In higher education, there are practical courses that use training equipment. These courses need to be conducted in an environment that is as close to the actual environment as possible. However, for example, in training on operating radiation equipment, there are issues, e.g., radiation therapy equipment is very expensive so its utilization should be limited, risks of exposure to radiation, and actual patients impractical. Educational materials using XR (eXtended Reality) seems useful solution to these issues. XR is as a general term of VR (Virtual Reality), AR (Augmented Reality), and MR (Mixed Reality). This article introduces the XR educational material development systems proposed by the authors and the XR educational materials developed using these systems, and also discusses related research trends.

It is a significant challenge even for experienced human lecturers to maintain learners’ attention and promote their understanding. Toward this issue, we have developed an interactive robot lecture system, in which a robot provides a learner with one-on-one lesson and attempts to detect his/her states during a lecture using gaze and posture sensors to maintain and recover his/her attention. The robot dynamically interacts with him/her by means of the detected states in a model-based approach. The results of the case study reveal that the robot can maintain learners’ attention during a lecture, and that it can promote their understanding of the lectured contents. In addition, the robot utilized real-time sensing of gaze and posture data to achieve high accuracy of state detection and interaction in comparison with human lecturers. These findings suggest that the interactive robot lecture system developed in this work has the potential of promoting learners’ engagement and understanding during a lecture.

Self-review is essential in improving presentation skill particularly for novice researchers. However, they often have difficulties in reviewing their own presentation. We have accordingly designed a presentation robot system that can reproduce their presentation including presentation behavior as their avatar, and allow them to self-review their presentation in an objective way. In order to further their engagement on self-review, this paper investigates an influence of the roles of the robot (their avatar or their peer) on self-reviewing their own presentation. Robot roles could give learners a confirmation bias to their own thoughts, emotions, attitudes, interaction ways, etc., related to learning. In this work, we have conducted a case study with the robot system whose purpose was to investigate whether the robot role as the learners’ peer produces some effects on reviewing their own presentation than the role as their avatar. The results suggest that the role as the peer could promote their engagement and cognitive awareness in self-reviewing their own presentation.