Understanding Online Education in Metaverse: Systems and User Experience Perspectives

Thanks to recent advances in immersive technologies, virtual reality (VR) is becoming increasingly popular in online education, particularly in light of the rise of the Metaverse. However, there is currently no in-depth investigation of the user experience of VR-based online education and the comparison of it with video-conferencing-based counterparts. To fill these critical gaps, we conduct multiple sessions of two courses in a university with 10 and 37 participants on Mozilla Hubs (Hubs for short), a social VR platform that is deemed as one of the early prototypes of the Metaverse, and let them compare the classroom experience on Hubs with Zoom, a popular video-conferencing application. In addition to employing traditional analytical methods to understand user experience, we benefit from an end-to-end measurement study of Hubs to corroborate our findings and systematically detect its performance bottlenecks. Our study leads to the following key observations. First, the scalability issue of Hubs makes it inadequate for accommodating large courses. Second, compared to Zoom, Hubs can offer a better sense of place presence and social presence to students, thanks to its avatar-based interactions and the hand and head tracking enabled by headsets. Third, even though VR headsets help students concentrate in class, effectively utilizing learning tools through them remains a challenge.