Immersive Education:What Do We Know?

October 18th, 2016

Overview

• Thesis• Presence• Twilight Effect• Proteus Effect• Uncanny Valley• Training Theory Again

Background

• I’ve been researching a book for a few months

• Have ‘collected’ a bunch of findings on VR & Immersive tech – we’ll review some of the most interesting.

Working Theses

VR will dramatically improve training and learning for some things, but not necessarily others.• VR instruction will be better for novices than

experts• VR collaboration will work for experts and might

for novices• VR will be better for experiential learning than

factual learning

PRESENCEFirst, what do we know about Doing VR?

What & Why of Presence

• “Presence” is the sense of being there:– How much is the illusion of VR really working?

• To the degree this lowers distraction from the new medium, and increases engagement, it will help learning

Examples

• The “Pit” – heart rates go up, GSR increases when presented with a high elevation

• Subjects in an experience with high levels of perceived presence more likely to be persuaded by health messages

• Children reported more false memories

In other words, high presence can mean you experience the VR simulation as if it were real.

Inducing Embodiment in Presence

• “Rubber Hand” experiment is relatively old and established.

• If what we see reacts like our bodies, moves when we want it to

• If the body we see is doing the things we’re making our body do, we’ll assume its ours

Sense of Embodiment

• Three factors:– the sense of self-location – ego centric view is the

baseline.– the sense of agency – am I able to act?– the sense of body ownership – do those hands

move where I tell them to?

Involvement as Moderator

• How much do you care if it’s really your body?

• This is important because we don’t think about embodiment very hard, and we accept that the virtual body is our avatar (vs. actually believing it is our body)

• The less we care, the less the immersive environment has to convince us for us to just accept it.

HIGH PRESENCE VR IS THE MOST HIGH-BANDWIDTH COMMUNICATION EVER

DEVISED.

When you’re in a VR rig, and fully engaged, all of your visual processing system is focused on the

content presented.

Nothing else comes close.

High Presence, Low Recall?

• Some studies have used highly vivid experiences, and found that recall was low

• Why?

• Just like overly stimulating advertising, the experience can distract from the message.

Immersion is not the same as presence

• Presence is a psychological thing– Am I committed to the experience?

• Immersion is a technological thing– Is the outside world shut off, and the experience

compelling?

Avatars vs. Agents• When thinking of instructional

tech – are we using a person or a machine-generated instructor?

• Avatar is representing a human• Agent is representing a machine

Blascovich theorizes that users will respond as if the virtual human is real no matter the technical richness, as long as they think there’s a real person behind the avatar.

Studies show that:1. Virtual Humans exert influence

if:a. User believes the Virtual

Human is computer or human controlled

b. Accuracy of behaviorsc. Realistic low-level

reactionsd. Situational relevance – do

they care?

Mo-Cap is More Important Than Massive Polygons

We care more about signs of sentience than perfect rendering.

This is because of what I’m calling the Twilight Effect

Presence in “Classroom”

• WE know that students who have the sole attention of a teacher learn more.

• In VR, studies have shown that this works as well – with the effect that everyone in the class can have the sole attention of the teacher.

Co-Presence• In addition to being there, you are there with others.

• What determines the sense that others are there?

• Not richness of tech, not really movement – mostly what they say, how naturally they respond. Essentially social cues.– Several sessions have shown that users barely move their avatars,

preferring instead to focus on conversation.• This ‘how they respond’ means the sense of being perceived

– that is a critical factor.

Designing Space

• Three kinds of space around you:– Peripersonal space – as far as your arms will go– Extrapersonal space – as far as you’re likely to

walk/navigate– Vista space – background

• Judging distances is hard. Several cues, like shadows and brightness, don’t really work. Perspective, and ‘motion parallax’ are most effective for users.

Use of Space

• Several researchers have tested co-location as a means to foster creativity.

• Space in VR doesn’t have to be ‘stateless’ we can make notes in thin air, make personal audio recordings. The whole environment can be a toolkit.

TWILIGHT EFFECT

Humans are Very Tolerant of Poor Visual Input

• Visual processing is at least as much top-down as bottom up: we see largely what we expect to see

• We are also evolved to deal with poor visual conditions – dark, fog, water, etc.

• We look for cues that survive bad visual conditions

Motion & Reactions as Key Cues

• We’re looking for signs of sentience:– Verbal response– Natural-looking motion– Emotional interaction

Think of Pixar:

Famous Voices lend personality

Motion-capture lends natural

reactions

Twilight Effect

• Signs of sentience will dominate poor execution, poor VR tech

• These signs must be relatively constant, as the evaluation of an ‘other’ as sentient may be provisional

PROTEUS EFFECT

Embodying a Different Body

What happens when you become:• Taller = more confident• Beautiful = more social• Minority = more understanding, less biased

Proteus effect is robust – we take on, sometimes for weeks, elements of the identities we inhabit in VR

UNCANNY VALLEY

HypothesisAs one makes artificial humans, especially faces, more and more real, there is a degree of ‘realness’ between completely real and some midpoint, that users find aversive.

Some research on the subject – VR research I’ve found said that the only uncanny valley effects found were when features were exaggerated or otherwise disturbing on their own.

Avatars & Uncanny Valley• Research on this will be fraught,

as a badly drawn execution is just as aversive as the ‘uncanniness’ of an almost-human.

• Make avatars look as good as we can, and make 100% sure their reactions, and movements, and voices all sound human – as these are not affected by the ‘twilight effect’.

Some Key Takeaways

• Presence is key to holding attention• Creating presence is about embodiment – feeling you

“own” the thing in the virtual environment (VE)• That comes from matching what your real body does

to what it sees in the virtual environment• Richness of VE isn’t the key, richness of human

communication is• Users will forgive all sorts of technical failings if the

voice at the other end sounds human, reacts sentiently.

LEARNING THEORY REVIEW

Cognitive Load

Intrinsic: Keep the tasks just beyond the learner’s abilityExtraneous: Keep distraction to a minimumGermane: Enable reflection on the material to be learned

Extraneous Load

• Immersion, as described above, should enable minimization of extraneous load

• Presence, as a psychological construct, should further enable minimization of distractions & extraneous load

Intrinsic Load

• More complex problems can be handled if working memory tasks can be offloaded – by storing thoughts in the environment.

• Notes, but multi-modal, sitting in thin air, automatically stored or deleted.

• Relatedly, worked examples can be experienced.• Faded examples can also be experienced vs. just

imagined.

Germane Load

• 100% environmental control allows for pointers to appear, reminders to think about the lesson to be learned vs. the task to be completed.

• Exact duplicate of an experience can be replicated, allowing learners to re-experience a half-learned lesson.

• An immersive experience can be rewinded.

Expertise

• Multi-media learning studies have shown that novices benefit from video & graphics, whereas experts often find them distracting.

• VR, with it’s overwhelming experience of a virtual world, can be expected to have an enhanced version of this:– Novices will learn faster when conceptual support

is helpful– Experts will find it distracting

Multi-Media Learning Lessons Apply

• Don’t put text over graphics• Use VO to add to graphic• Use graphic instead of text whenever possible• Avoid music• Avoid accents• Keep lessons short

Summary

• We know a fair bit about how to create good VR Education.

• By this Sunday, I’ll have a 10-15 page summary. Would love your input!– I’ll post it on the meetup

• About 100+ papers went into this – they’ll all be on a google drive I’ll share via meetup.

Thank you