Using 360 VR video to improve the learning experience in veterinary medicine university degree

Abstract

We present the results of the Quality of Experience (QoE) evaluation of 360 degree immersive video in university education. Fourth-year Veterinary Medicine students virtually attended some practical lessons which had been recorded in immersive 360 video format, covering topics of Surgical Pathology and Surgery related to horses. One hundred students participated in the experience. They evaluated it through an extensive questionnaire covering several QoE factors, including presence, audiovisual quality, satisfaction or cybersickness: 79% evaluated the experience as excellent or good, and they acknowledged an improvement of the learning process by the implementation of VR as didactic tool, and 91% reported that they would recommend it to other students. Female students consistently gave slightly better average scores than their male counterparts, although mostly within confidence intervals. Strongest inter-gender differences appeared in active social presence dimensions, according to the Temple Presence Inventory. The study also evaluates the suitability of synthetic measurement protocols, such as the Distributed Reality Experience Questionnaire (DREQ) and Net Promoter Score (NPS). We show that NPS is a valid tool for QoE analysis, but that its clustering boundary values must be adapted to the specificities of the experiment population.