VRTeaching: Mental and Psychophysiological Effects in Virtual Reality Remote Lectures

Remote teaching often feels unnatural and restricted compared to on-site lectures, as traditional teaching aids are reduced to a 2D interface. The increasing adoption of VR expands online teaching platforms by offering new possibilities for educational content and enables teachers to teach more intuitively. In this paper, we introduce the tool VRTeaching, a platform designed for presenters to enable immersive lectures using VR glasses and integrated tools such as an interactive whiteboard that can display slides, built-in chat integration to enable communication, and interactivity features such as polls or audience questions. The presented study includes an expert evaluation assessing the usability and the potential of the teaching and learning platform, and an investigation of the mental demand and psychophysiological responses of teachers and students giving presentations depending on the teaching environment. The results indicate a significantly higher mental demand for the VR environment than the online environment, with no significant effects on the psychophysiological measures. Despite the increased subjective perception of mental demand, participants recognized the VR tool as having great potential.