Seeing through others’ eyes in immersive VR: insights from a user study

Abstract Despite the increasing usage of collaborative Virtual Reality in classrooms, teachers often struggle to ascertain whether the participants are adequately sharing the same viewpoint and are seeing the same information during lectures. Virtual Reality offers numerous advantages, including immersive experiences that enhance traditional classroom instruction and foster active and cooperative learning. A relevant part of the teaching process involves pointing to concrete regions or points of the virtual scene, and describing them. At this point, it is important that the pupils are able to see the same that is being seen by the instructor. In this paper we analyze viewpoint sharing methods commonly used in the literature, like teleport, 2D views with or without continuous streaming, and propose a novel method, dubbed Model Movement (MM). Our application layout is structured around a central 3D model that acts as the primary focal point at the collaborative session and the experiments were performed using 3D anatomical models. We conducted a user study with 32 participants (local and nominally remote) where participants were asked multiple times to swap to the instructor’s viewpoint and tracked their response times and their movement in the scene, among other variables. The data analysis and results of the questionnaires indicate that MM appears to be the preferred, more effective and usable of the analyzed techniques at showing the region of interest to inspect.