HyperXRC: Hybrid In-Person + Remote Extended Reality Classroom - A Design Study

This paper investigates HyperXRC, a hybrid classroom design that accommodates both local and remote students. The instructor wears an extended reality (XR) headset that shows the local classroom and the local students, as well as remote students modeled with video sprites. The remote students are displayed either on virtual banners hanging off the classroom ceiling, or on virtual billboards placed in empty classroom seats. Thereby, the remote students are integrated into the field of view of the instructor, who remains aware of the remote students while teaching. A controlled user study with two experiments evaluated the HyperXRC design from the instructor and from the local students perspective. In the first experiment (N = 15) participants served as instructors to a hybrid classroom of 14 local and 15 remote students. Participants were more likely to detect hand-raising and head-on-desk remote student actions in the HyperXRC conditions (59%) than in a conventional videoconferencing condition (36%). This advantage did not come at the cost of decreasing the detection rate of local student actions. Furthermore, instructor participants preferred the HyperXRC to the videoconferencing approach. In the second experiment (N = 16) participants served as local students. The participants preferred the lecture when the instructor used videoconferencing to the one when the instructor used HyperXRC, wearing the XR headset.