Exploring Influences of Design and Environmental Factors on Recognizing Teacher's Facial Expressions in Educational VR

Yu Han, Jie Hao, Yu Miao, Yue Liu

Abstract: Teachers' facial expressions significantly influence students' willingness to learn. However, insufficient resolution of current consumer head-mounted displays leads to difficulties in capturing nuances of virtual teachers in VR, which may be solved by scaling up the heads of virtual teachers. In this paper, we explore the effects of design and environmental factors on the ideal head scales for recognizing the virtual teacher's facial expressions. Our results show that the facial visualization style and the distance from the user to the virtual teacher are important factors affecting facial expression recognition, which could contribute to the design and optimization of educational VR.