XRStudio: A Virtual Production and Live Streaming System for Immersive Instructional Experiences

TLDR

There is growing interest in using virtual reality for education, yet it often remains an isolated experience that is hard to integrate into existing instructional practices. This study adapts virtual‑production techniques from filmmaking to enable mixed‑reality capture of instructors, allowing them to appear directly within virtual scenes. XRStudio combines virtual‑production capture of instructors with live‑streaming software to compose mixed‑reality lectures, offering preset compositing options and real‑time output to both conventional video and immersive formats, and was evaluated through designer interviews, instructor demos, and student comparisons of immersive versus traditional video.

Abstract

There is increased interest in using virtual reality in education, but it often remains an isolated experience that is difficult to integrate into current instructional experiences. In this work, we adapt virtual production techniques from filmmaking to enable mixed reality capture of instructors so that they appear to be standing directly in the virtual scene. We also capitalize on the growing popularity of live streaming software for video conferencing and live production. With XRStudio, we develop a pipeline for giving lectures in VR, enabling live compositing using a variety of presets and real-time output to traditional video and more immersive formats. We present interviews with media designers experienced in film and MOOC production that informed our design. Through walkthrough demonstrations of XRStudio with instructors experienced with VR, we learn how it could be used in a variety of domains. In end-to-end evaluations with students, we analyze and compare differences of traditional video vs. more immersive lectures with XRStudio.