eLIVE: e-Learning Laboratory for Immersive Virtual Environments

The adoption of virtual laboratories has seen significant growth, particularly within tertiary education, driven by the increasing need for flexible, accessible, and scalable learning environments. A significant development in this area is the integration of Virtual Reality (VR) technologies, leading to the emergence of VR Labs, which offer immersive, interactive simulations that enhance experiential learning. Recognizing the potential of these VR Labs to transform education, several Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have begun incorporating them as part of the course content, providing students with hands-on experience that transcends geographical and physical limitations. Some of these VR Labs use avatar recordings to demonstrate lab procedures, but research on their design for effective learning and live learner monitoring remains limited. In this work, we examined how experiment complexity, equipment placement, and instructor avatar positioning affect learning in a VR Lab. By analyzing an existing avatar recording-based VR Lab, we designed an improved VR Lab by using the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) test for COVID-19 in biomedical engineering as an example experiment. We conducted a user study with 10 users to evaluate the learning experience and gathered feedback on live monitoring and educational use of VR Labs from a learner's perspective. The findings are summarized as novel design guidelines for creating enhanced avatar recording-based VR Labs, focusing on the experiment steps, the equipment placement, the instructor avatar placement, a monitoring interface, and recommendations on utilizing VR Labs as a pedagogical tool in standalone experiences and a course component scenario.