| Affiliations: | |
| Project Leader: | Soo Chun soowanchun@tamu.edu Visualization |
| Faculty Mentor: | Dr. Jinsil Seo, Ph.D. |
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Meeting Times:
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Friday 3:00 pm – 4:00 pm |
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Team Size:
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3
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| Open Spots: | 0 |
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Special Opportunities:
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Students would gain a deeper understanding of Human Computer Interaction Research as well as explore the creation and development of an educational virtual reality environment.
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Team Needs:
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Weekly meetings, knowledge in development and creation of 3D environments, and knowledge in development and creation of user interfaces for virtual reality environments. |
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Description:
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Teamwork, usually defined as multiple people interacting with each other over a period of time to achieve a common goal, of fundamental importance to the operations and success of organizations, and permeate almost every facet of today’s professional organization landscape. Traditionally, teamwork has been studied within the context of human communication in a physical environment within close proximity (fact-to-face teams). However, the rapid development of information and communication technology (ICT) and the resultant increasing globalization have necessitated the evolution of organization structure and operation frameworks. As a result, all aspects of teamwork need to adapt to the emerging digitization of the global society, and teams whose members do not share a common workspace and must therefore collaborate using ICT tools (virutal teams) have emerged as the next stage of evolution in teamwork. In this research, we plan to investigate people’s trusting and distrusting experience and behaviors in Virtual Reality Education in a collaborative environment. Education has been increasingly recognized as a field where VR technology have substantial potential for contributing to its advancement. One of the fundamental factors for effective education is trust among learners and teachers. While trust and distrust has been extensively studied across many scenarios, there are scant studies in understanding trust and distrust in the VR environment, and none in a VR education environment. Likewise, collaboration in a VR environment for educational purposes lacks investigations. Purpose: We aim to explore student trust and distrust in a VR environment for education while also investigating how students collaborate in such environments. We will investigate participants’ experiences while they interact with virtual elements in educational VR environments and how the VR environment and characters affect participants’ behaviors. One of the aspects that we focus on is how different VR avatar styles (i.e., their voices) impact the participant’s behavior regarding the Uncanny Valley Hypothesis. Significance: This study will provide insights on learning effects in VR education under differentiated avatar design, and the the behavioral characteristics of human trust/distrust capability and behaviors in VR education. This study will also produce practical guidelines in designing VR education systems that better facilitate human communications and interactions and enhance education effectiveness. |