Mathematics Input for Educational Applications in Virtual Reality

Virtual Reality (VR) enables new ways of learning by providing an interactive environment to learn through failure and by allowing new interaction methods engaging the users' bodies. Literature from productive failure and embodied cognition shows that these two aspects are particularly important for mathematics education. However, very little research has been looking into how to input mathematical expressions in VR. This gap impairs the learning process as it prevents the learners from connecting the VR mathematical objects with their formal representations. In this paper, we bridge this gap by presenting two interaction techniques for mathematics input in VR: a Keyboard-like method and a Drag-and-drop method. We report the results of our quantitative user study in terms of usability, ease of learning, low overhead, task load, and motion sickness.