Towards the Development and Understanding of Collaborative Mixed-Reality Learning Spaces

The current era of advanced display technologies, such as head-mounted displays,smart glasses and handheld devices, has supported the usage of mixed reality and augmented reality concepts in smart educational classrooms. These advanced technologies have enabled enhanced collaborations and interactive communication between distance learners and local learners. Whilst being present, immersed and engaged are key factors in both the real and virtual worlds, they play particularly important roles in improving students collaborative learning performance during learning activities. However, few empirical studies have considered how using such interfaces may affect learning outcomes and whether students truly feel fully immersed and engaged in such environments. Furthermore, the lack of support and a conceptual architecture for collaborative mixed and augmented reality group learning activities is still a shortcoming for distance learning and teaching, and a significant challenge to researchers. This study demonstrates a conceptual framework that supports group distance learning and teaching collaboration around learning activities using mixed, augmented and virtual reality technologies. The study also explores learning effectiveness based on the following factors: students presence, engagement and immersion in smart environments. To evaluate these factors, we utilise several existing frameworks that have been applied to our mixed reality platform, MiRTLE+, to help us examine the learning outcomes and teaching experience gained from using these environments. The study was divided into two experimental phases, and 40 samples were examined to assess and compare the affordances of mixed reality interfaces within various collaborative learning scenarios, applying a card game activity (Uno) as a learning task. By comparing the real collaborative learning activities with the two-dimensional web-based activity, we found that novices had slightly better learning performance than the individuals using the web-based activity and that both phases mimicked reality. Novices and experts also felt significantly more present and immersed in the MiRTLE+ learning scenarios (due to the impact of the augmented reality interfaces) than in the web-based scenario.