On the interaction features of the Virtual
Reality User Interface of an educational game
Maria Virvou, George Katsionis &
Konstantinos Manos
Department of Informatics
University of Piraeus
Piraeus 18534, Greece
[email protected]; [email protected];
[email protected]
Educational games
 The attractiveness of software games has often been
considered very useful for the creation of attractive
educational software.
 Many researchers have developed projects towards the
development of software games for education that aim
at increasing the students’ motivation and engagement
while they learn.
 However, if these games are to be introduced in
classrooms they have to be usable and likeable by all
students.
Educational games
 There is a difference at the level of expertise on
software game playing among children .
 Computer games that are introduced in classrooms
might cause problems to some students instead of help
them in their learning process.
 In this paper, we describe the results of the analysis of
students’ interactions with an educational virtual reality
game.
Virtual Reality Game
 A highly interactive Virtual Reality Game. The game is
called VR-ENGAGE and teaches students geography.
 Similar to many commercial adventure game
 The player “walks” inside a maze looking for the “Book of
Wisdom”. In the maze he:
 Finds agents that guide him
 Objects (keys, maps) to help him
 Guards and doors bearing riddles to be solved
 Utilizes domain specific knowledge
The VR-Environment of the Game
The VR-Environment of the Game
User Interactions
 Empirical study involving 50 school children of
11-12 years old from 5 geography classes
 Separated based on previous VR experience in:
Experienced, Intermediate, Novice players
 A short training was given to the novice players
 The play time was set to 2 hours during which the
were not allowed any assistance
User Interface Acquaintance
 Level of understanding of the User Interface
 It showed whether the player
 Knew concepts like “Inventory”, “Tutorhint”, etc.
 Knew how to use facilities like the “Map”
 Understood the basic functionality of a
Virtual Environment
User Interface Acquaintance
 The way a student used or not used the functionality
that the game provided, revealed us how acquainted
he/she is with similar games.
 We were able to measure the missed opportunities
they had to use parts of the functionality in difficult
situations.
User Interface Acquaintance
80
60
Novice
40
Intermediate
20
Experienced
0
% Inventory idle
% Map idle
% Tutor-Hint idle
Figure 1. The percentage of each functionality that was not used in cases it was needed.
Navigational effort
 This feature shows how well the student can
navigate through the Virtual World
 We measure the frequency of actions:
 Bumping into walls
 Aimless rotation around the same spot
 Aimless “clicks” inside the environment
Navigational effort
 You can not expect all students to know how to
play a Virtual Reality Game.
 The main features that can be observed are, not
being able to move and aimless movement.
 We were able to measure the times they had
navigational problems that distracted them from
the game.
Navigational effort
40
30
Novice
20
Intermediate
10
Experienced
0
Times stucked
Times confused
Figure 2. The occurrences of each navigation problem.
VR Environment Distractions
 Many times student seemed to be overtaken by
the Virtual Environment, forgetting the real
purpose of the game
 It is very difficult to discern between actual
distraction and navigational problems or low UI
Acquaintance levels
VR Environment Distractions
 Although we would like to have much more specific
measurements about this, it was really difficult to know
when a student was really in such a condition and to
measure how much time did he\she lose by being
distracted.
 Despite these problems we managed to gather some
information about the times the students got distracted.
VR Environment Distractions
50
40
30
Novice
20
Intermediate
10
Experienced
0
Occurences
% Percentage
Figure 3. The occurrences of distraction and their percentage in the total delay.
Conclusions
 The virtual reality user interface of an educational software
game has been analyzed based on the interactions of students
with it. The students were classified into experienced,
intermediate and novice game players
 The students’ actions could be interpreted by three interaction
features:
 User Interface Acquaintance
 Navigational Effort
 VR Environment Distractions