Evaluation of the Performance of an Immersive System for Tele-education

Abstract

Tele-education was already a solution for people who cannot attend lessons in person (such as inaccessibility in rural areas or illness issues). However, COVID has revealed problems in tele-education with current technology, causing adolescents and children to slow down their learning curves and experience problems of social distancing with their classmates. This paper presents a user study to validate an immersive communication system for tele-education purposes. This system streams in real time a class using 360-degree cameras, allowing remote students to explore the whole scene and improving the feeling of being in the classroom with their colleagues. Additionally, the prototype provides notifications to the remote students about events (such as a changes in the teacher's presentation or classmates raising their hands) that occur outside their viewport to indicate in which direction they should move their heads to visualize them. To validate the system and investigate its possible added value, socioemotional factors such as presence, perceived quality, usability, and usefulness of the notifications were evaluated through a user test using questionnaires. The obtained results show that using immersive tele-education systems can improve the presence, as well as the benefits of the notifications on the experience of the remote students.