AIVRTeach: Empowering Virtual Reality Classrooms with AI-Generated Content

Virtual Reality (VR) has emerged as a revolutionary tool, revolutionizing how students engage with and learn from educational materials. Many learning platforms have developed VR classroom applications, accommodating instructors and students within virtual environments and facilitating the integration of educational content, such as texts, images, videos, and 3D objects. However, existing teaching patterns that pre-assemble educational content before class may entail certain limitations, including passive knowledge reception, inflexible classroom interactivity, burdened content creation, etc. This article investigates how Artificial Intelligence-Generated Content (AIGC) can enhance VR classrooms and transform traditional VR teaching patterns. Specifically, we implement a VR classroom prototype that integrates text-to-3D generative AI technology and conduct an investigation involving 30 participants from different roles and education levels. Our analysis delves into the motivations, concerns, and challenges of using AIGC in VR education. We discuss design implications and pioneeringly contribute empirical insights for designing more practical AIGC-empowered VR classroom applications.