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

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

User Interactions  Empirical study involving 50 school children of 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”, “Tutor- hint”, 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 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 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 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