XRAuthor
posted on 27 Feb 2025 by songjia
Creating learning content in multiple formats of different immersion levels
Brief
The core design of the tool is to help educators create interactive learning content in multiple formats via a simple and familiar process.
It lets users record demonstration videos with markers and only requires minimal user inputs of video segmentation to generate the following three formats (see Fig. 1) of interactive learning content automatically:
- Video Format: footages recorded by webcam, augmented with virtual object overlay, segmented into steps, having multiple-choice questions for each step, used on a computer;
- Interactive Format: animations of virtual objects with/without video background, having interactive tasks for each step, used on a computer;
- VR Format: animations and tasks in immersive VR environments (classroom or some relevant surroundings), being able to show/hide the recorded video.
Fig. 1. (A) Video Format: a participant answering a multiple-choice question in a standalone web app, (B) Interactive Format: a participant interacting with cubes to complete a step of the learning content embedded in the Wikipedia page of tree sort, and (C) VR Format: a participant completing a step in VR.
Considering accessibility, we implemented the tool to run in a web browser on a computer without any installation. It has a minimalist UI (see Fig. 2), having four buttons for the tool’s major modes at the top, a viewing area for displaying authored content in the middle and a progress bar with editing and playing controls at the bottom.
Fig. 2. A video recording is being edited in the tool.
After setting up the markers, the authoring process could start with recording a regular demonstration video and afterwards have an edit-review loop on the video footage until the author is satisfied with the content and upload it to the server (see Fig. 3). The content could be used as a standalone web app or be embedded into existing web pages. Learners could access the content online in the preferred format (see Fig. 1).
Fig. 3. Tool Authoring Process
Live demo:
We are currently running studies with educators, learners and developers to evaluate their user experience with XRAuthor.
Members
- Songjia SHEN
- Chek Tien TAN
- Tuck Wah LEONG
- William RAFFE
- Tim CHEN
Outputs
Publication
Songjia Shen, Chek Tien Tan, Hsiang-Ting Chen, William L Raffe, and Tuck Wah Leong. 2025. Educator Perceptions of XRAuthor: An Accessible Tool for Authoring Learning Content with Different Immersion Levels. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ‘25), April 26-May 1, 2025, Yokohama, Japan. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 11 pages. (preprint)
Usable Artifact
An open source tool of XRAuthor to create learning content of multiple formats by using a simple webcam: