Look at me! Can a pedagogical agent facilitate orientation and support learning in VR?

Virtual reality (VR) is very promising for educational purposes but also presents learners with difficulties regarding orientation. Accordingly, VR environments should be designed to facilitate orientation, for example, by cueing. In a pre-registered laboratory experiment (between-subject design, 91 participants), we investigated the effects of a pedagogical agent cue compared to a light cue and a control condition without cues on search time, learning, mental representation, and perceived presence in a VR learning environment. Participants were tasked with locating tools in a virtual workshop environment, accompanied by a narration providing information about each tool. In the condition with the pedagogical agent cue, the agent was positioned close to the search objects and performed occasional gaze shifts to the object, whereas objects in the light cue condition were illuminated by a slightly reddish light. Both cueing methods significantly decreased search time but did neither affect learning outcomes nor the acquisition of the mental spatial representation of the learning environment. Additionally, the pedagogical agent cue reduced physical presence compared to the control condition and self-presence compared to both other conditions. In summary, these results imply that even with successful attention guidance, both types of cueing did not facilitate learning outcomes. It is an open question whether these effects generalize to larger VR environments and if different design choices regarding the pedagogical agent might influence presence positively, which might, in turn, lead to better learning outcomes.