Virtual reality in education: The impact of high-fidelity nonverbal cues on the learning experience

Integrating variant Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) into the learning process provides students and teachers alike with specialized tools which eliminate the distance between them and create a classroom-like experience. Virtual Reality (VR) is bound to not only match the qualities of interpersonal communication for distance-learning but reconfigure the learning process altogether, providing students and teachers with novel hyper-tools and methods for presentation and interaction. Virtual Reality Learning Environments (VRLEs) are already being designed, developed, and tested out as an educational tool. Among the less investigated aspects of VRLEs is the impact of avatars and characters Nonverbal Cues (NVCs) on the students' learning experience. This study presents the development of a prototype which uses off-the-shelf technologies commonly used in Social Virtual Reality (SVR) platforms to capture a real professor's body motion and gaze, along with his facial expressions, in real-time, during the delivery of a real lecture. The recorded data are later solved onto a high-fidelity avatar delivering the same lecture in a VRLE. A between-groups study including ninety-six (96) participants, all university students, revealed no correlation between the professor's avatar NVCs fidelity and perceived usability, realism, usefulness, and social presence, and no differences in knowledge acquisition as well.