Collaborative Research: CISE-MSI: DP: HCC: Buenas - Giving All a Seat at the Table Using Mixed Reality

协作研究：CISE-MSI：DP：HCC：布埃纳斯 - 使用混合现实为所有人提供席位

• 批准号: 2318656
• 负责人: Anitha Chennamaneni
• 金额: $ 20万
• 依托单位: Texas A&M University - Central Texas
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2023-08-01 至 2026-07-31
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2318656&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; CISE; MSI; DP

Online learning has become a critical aspect of modern post-secondary education, with many colleges and universities incorporating both synchronous and asynchronous online courses into their curricula. These kinds of courses can increase access to education for students from minority backgrounds, who are frequently of non-traditional student ages and may often need to travel farther and have fewer resources for attending in-class learning activities. However, online learning has not yet reached its full potential, with students reporting feeling disconnected from their on-campus classmates and instructor. Study groups are essential to undergraduate education, yet they have been especially problematic to replicate online. Conventional videoconferencing systems are inadequate for supporting the dynamic dialogue and good eye contact that are prerequisite to successful study groups. The Buenas research project will use mixed reality to develop a format for remote study group interaction that will allow local and remote students to interact naturally and effectively. Buenas will allow all students to see each other at their correct relative location and size, while providing advantages such as intuitiveness, situation awareness, depth perception, and increased sense of presence. The project has the potential to advance the effectiveness of small group meetings with hybrid local and remote attendance, especially for under-represented members of society, and will involve students from Minority-Serving Institutions (MSI) in research endeavors.Buenas will use mixed reality headsets to immerse remote students into local study groups. The goal is to allow local and remote students to interact naturally, as if all members of the group were co-located. At the local site, cardboard screens will be placed in unoccupied seats around the study group table to project video sprites (i.e., life-sized, background-subtracted videos) of the remote students onto them. At each remote site, a remote student will visualize the other students’ video sprites in mixed reality, integrated into their office spaces via virtual floating panels. The Buenas system will be validated via three user studies. The first study will compare study group sessions hosted with Buenas against sessions hosted via videoconferencing. The second study will compare various ways of representing the remote student, i.e., with a video sprite showing the person wearing a headset, with a computer animation avatar, and with a video sprite where the headset is removed through inpainting. The third study will evaluate Buenas with remote students connecting from their homes. The project will involve over two hundred students from the three collaborating institutions, two of which are MSIsThis award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

在线学习已成为现代高等教育的一个重要方面，许多学院和大学将同步和异步在线课程纳入其课程，这些课程可以增加少数族裔背景的学生接受教育的机会，这些学生通常是非少数民族。 - 传统学生的年龄可能经常需要旅行更远的地方，并且参加课堂学习活动的资源较少。然而，在线学习尚未充分发挥其潜力，学生们表示感觉与校园内的同学和老师脱节。小组对于本科生来说是必不可少的教育，但传统的视频会议系统在支持动态对话和良好的眼神交流方面尤其困难，而这是成功学习小组的先决条件，布埃纳斯研究项目将使用混合现实来开发远程学习小组的格式。允许本地和远程学生自然有效地互动，布埃纳斯将允许所有学生在正确的相对位置和大小上看到彼此，同时提供诸如直观性、情境意识、深度感知和增强的临场感等优势。该项目有有望提高本地和远程混合出席的小组会议的有效性，特别是对于代表性不足的社会成员，并将让少数族裔服务机构 (MSI) 的学生参与研究工作。Buenas 将使用混合现实耳机沉浸在远程环境中目标是让本地和远程学生能够自然地互动，就好像该小组的所有成员都在本地一样，纸板屏幕将放置在学习小组桌子周围的空闲座位上。项目视频在每个远程站点，远程学生将在混合现实中可视化其他学生的视频精灵，并通过虚拟浮动面板集成到他们的办公空间中。 Buenas 系统将通过三项用户研究进行验证。第一项研究将比较由 Buenas 主持的学习小组会议与通过视频会议主持的会议。第二项研究将比较代表远程学生的各种方式，即使用视频精灵。第三项研究将通过远程学生在家中进行连接来评估布埃纳斯，该项目将涉及来自该校的 200 多名学生。三个合作机构，其中两个是 MSI。该奖项反映了 NSF 的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。