Abstract
This paper presents a usability study of wearable and handheld Mixed Reality and hypervideo technologies to support procedural learning in the vocational education and training context. As a case study an application based on the Tangram game was developed for HoloLens 2, Android smartphones and hypervideo. The app is structured as a procedural learning activity with incremental levels of scaffolding. The usability of these applications was evaluated in a user testing involving 90 students. No remarkable difference has emerged among the three applications in terms of completion rate during the learning process, but in the retention and transfer tasks HoloLens 2 users performed worse than users of the other devices. Considering the time on task metric, HoloLens 2 users time was aligned with hypervideo, while smartphone users generally took more time, probably because smartphones are not hand-free devices. An expert review was also conducted, providing a number of suggestions for improvements, mainly concerning the interaction design, and the positioning of holograms in the physical space. In the comparison among the devices, none was clearly preferred over the other: HoloLens 2 presented higher attractiveness, motivation of use, sense of immersion, but also greater cognitive load; handheld devices resulted easy to use but required considerable physical effort in activities where they needed to be hold for a long time. Hypervideo was easy to access, with an intuitive interaction, but less attractive.
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Acknowledgments
The work described in this paper has been partially funded by the State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI) of Swiss Confederation within the research project “Augmented reality and hypervideo combined: Interactive technologies to support procedural learning in initial vocational education and training” (MARHVEL). We thank Alberto Cattaneo and Vito Candido from the Swiss Federal University for Vocational Education and Training SFUVET, Lugano, for their precious collaboration in this project activity.
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Catenazzi, N., Sommaruga, L., Locatelli, C. (2023). Usability Evaluation of Mixed Reality Applications in VET Training. In: De Paolis, L.T., Arpaia, P., Sacco, M. (eds) Extended Reality. XR Salento 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14218. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43401-3_27
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