Teachers’ experience and situation awareness of airborne disease transmission through immersive augmented reality

The COVID-19 pandemic created the need to raise awareness about airborne disease transmission via respiratory particles. Immersive Augmented Reality (AR) could increase Situation Awareness (SA) about this invisible phenomenon. Teachers play an important role in handling health emergencies by providing health literacy and promoting protective behaviors and thus could benefit from this technology. The aim of this study was threefold: (a) to develop an immersive educational AR application that creates awareness about airborne disease transmission, (b) to empirically evaluate its effectiveness in terms of SA and user experience among teachers and (c) to investigate design issues and more specifically the role of color of the visualized respiratory particles. Two versions of the application were created for Magic Leap 1 AR glasses representing respiratory particles as red or blue spherical shapes. An empirical study with forty-eight educators was carried out to measure SA and user experience in terms of presence, simulator sickness, workload, and satisfaction. The results showed that the application created high levels of overall SA for both colors. Presence and satisfaction were very high regardless of color and positively correlated. Simulator sickness and workload were low regardless of color and were not correlated with SA or presence. Participants’ comments confirmed their high levels of presence, SA and satisfaction. In terms of gender differences, women scored slightly higher in SA but were more vulnerable to simulator sickness. Overall, results imply that immersive AR can create high SA about airborne disease transmission while providing a positive experience.