To social with social distance: a case study on a VR-enabled graduation celebration amidst the pandemic.

This paper introduces a timely case study on a 3D virtual reality-enabled graduation celebration project that provided an alternative approach to celebrating university graduation amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. The project was carefully designed with fun, engaging, and interactive activities to compensate for the cancelation of the conventional commencement in spring 2020 due to the pandemic. More than 20 graduating students, faculty and staff members participated in a 2-h virtual reality live event appearing as 3D avatars on their own computers. Quantitative and qualitative data collected from 10 participants were analyzed for user experience, cognitive contribution, technology acceptance, and the feasibility. Results revealed that such a project was technologically sound, functionally acceptable, user-friendly, and practically implementable. The results also informed the lessons learned from the current design and the places to improve. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10055-022-00646-2.

Introduction

Background

Early in 2020, the COVID-19 started to spread around the world and the pandemic is widely regarded as one of the most influential events in the twenty-first century. “Unprecedented” and “social distance” have been two of the most popular, in an unfortunate way, words of the year. With the pandemic going on, there have been drastic changes in people’s lives, and there was no exception in the education sectors. Schools and universities closed in mid-spring and started to make every painful effort to shift everything online. At the University of Missouri (MU), all educational activities became online after March, and the conventional Spring 2020 commencement and graduating ceremony had to be canceled, which was a great regret for the graduating students, their families, and the faculty members. Although the university did try to compensate for such a regret on the Spring 2020 graduating day by offering social media (Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram) hash-tagging and Zoom meeting gatherings, at the College of Education, graduating students were expressing sad feelings about not being able to socialize with peers and professors as anticipated.

Modern information and communication technologies enable a computer system to mimic the real world and go beyond the real world in a 3D environment, so that a user may interact with the computer-generated models and simulations. Virtual reality (VR) has been very popular during the recent decades in both research and practical sectors. Existing VR studies provide empirical evidence that VR environments may motivate and engage users, foster cooperation, provide a sense of immersion and presence, and help to develop collaborations (Cho and Lim 2015; Di Blas and Paolini 2014; Andreas et al. 2010; Wang et al. 2015). In both research and practical arenas, VR-based or VR-enabled activities and interventions are utilized across disciplines. For example, some researchers introduced VR applications in simulating medical emergencies and in training medical and nursing students about dissection and other clinical practices (Adamovich et al. 2009; Andersen et al. 2018; Chang and Weiner 2016; Cho et al. 2013; Smith and Hamilton 2015; Sugden et al. 2012). In the social science sectors like in the education field, people are also conducting research in VR-based educational scenarios, such as teaching and training, for a variety of students and learners (e.g., Bouta and Retalis 2012; Ke et al. 2020; Vesga et al. 2021; Xu and Wang 2021). Carefully designed scenarios in VR also help people with special needs. For instance, researchers conducted training sessions in VR to help users with autism or schizophrenia improve their social skills (e.g., Cox et al. 2017; Moon et al. 2020; Smith et al. 2015; Wang et al. 2018).

In situations like these during the pandemic, an online environment enabled by 3D virtual reality that provided social activities and offered a place for people to gather together could be an alternative to compensate for the aforementioned regret and to afford the graduating student and professors to social with a distance. Till the writing of this paper, the researcher failed to find any openly published papers pertaining to VR-enabled graduation solutions under the pandemic, although there have been other projects that addressed this issue but without any scholarly products yet. Some examples were virtual campuses created by college students from universities such as Pennsylvania, Boston University, and others within Minecraft (Anderson 2020). A number of creative K-12 students in Japan also constructed their own places for their telegraduation within Minecraft amidst the school closure (Wilson 2020). These projects were mostly like sandboxes in which students employed their own creativity to build and hold their graduation events without any systematic design supported by educational theories and without any empirical data collected to report to the research community. This current paper introduces a case study on the design and implementation of a 3D VR-enabled graduation celebration (VRGC) with fun, engaging, and interactive activities. The study also reports how participants perceived their VRGC experiences and what lesson could be learned from VRGC.

The choice of VR platform for VRGC

Thanks to the fast-evolving modern technologies that enable numerous forms of VR including the latest immersive ones such as the Oculus (Meta Platforms Inc., Menlo Park, the US) and the VIVE (HTC Vive Tech Corp., Seattle, the US), when talking about VR, people nowadays would normally think about wearing a headset or head-mounted display and being immersed in a virtual environment right in front of your eyes. However, such latest immersive technologies utilize specific hardware and higher-end computers which are not very price-friendly. Meanwhile, the connection over the Internet for such immersive VR devices may need extra server and bandwidth resources, which could be an obstacle for the users to get connected more easily.

The VR graduation celebration was designed and deployed on the open-source 3D VR platform OpenSimulator (2020), which is a desktop 3D virtual environment running on a client/server model. Such a platform resembles the SecondLife (Linden Lab, San Francisco, the US), but is free, open-source, and non-commercial. The technology itself is not new and may seem to be not competitive when many people in the VR field these days are dealing with those more immersive ones with head-mounted displays (HMD) such as the Oculus, the VIVE, or even the HoloLens (Microsoft, Redmond, the US). However, the major reason for such a choice was its feasibility to deploy based on the practical situations and obstacles back then two months after the COVID-19 outbreak, which were: (1) Unlike the latest VR technology, VRGC built upon OpenSimulator required only the regular in-home computers for a user to run the client side for a desktop 3D virtual experience. The setting at the client side was undemanding and self-configurable, and the server side could easily host dozens of users concurrently with both text chat and voice chat functions. In the meanwhile, the requirement of the Internet speed/bandwidth was not rigorous. Such a choice of VR technology would be practical for our students who came from a variety of economic and technical background; (2) the time period for the development of VRGC was limited to barely less than 10 days because of the disorders that many places were facing at the first one or two months of the pandemic. Although the developing team had the capacity to implement some more immersive solutions such as Unity3D-enabled VR experiences powered by the latest VR devices, it was not practical to construct a VRGC to fit the needs in such a short time, not to mention the necessity to buy dozens of VR devices and send them to students scattering around the country; and (3) as the VRGC was built to adults participants, platforms more kid- and adolescent-friendly such as the Minecraft were excluded.

The ultimate goal of doing research is to solve daily problems and offer solutions to real-world issues. It should be noted that it is not the intension of this paper to explore the utilization of the latest VR technologies, but to introduce the design and implementation of an achievable VR solution based on a feasible platform to resolve a real-world problem during the pandemic.

Theoretical foundation

Computer-supported collaborations in educational activities

Collaborations and social interactions are among those most important activities that we humans need. Powered by modern computing machineries, researchers and practitioners in recent decades have been adopting various kinds of technologies to help train, facilitate, encourage, and assess social interactive and collaborative educational activities across disciplines. Resta and Laferrière (2007) conducted a literature review about computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL) from the perspectives of technology affordances and social affordances, and found that CSCL was becoming a cross-disciplinary research area (e.g., epistemology, educational psychology, learning sciences, etc.). The use of technology to support collaborative learning appeared in diverse fields of studies, such as language (Carrió-Pastor and Skorczynska 2015), engineering (Sumtsova et al. 2018), music (King 2008), and psychology (Magen-Nagar and Shonfeld 2018). Among popular technologies used for CSCL, online learning and chatting systems contribute a big part (e.g., Carrió-Pastor and Skorczynska 2015; Janssen et al. 2012; Zhu 2012). Game-based learning is also popular (e.g., Fonseca et al. 2021; Hämäläinen et al. 2006; Hämäläinen 2011; Hsiao et al. 2014; Wendel et al. 2013) in fostering collaborations and social interactions among learners during the learning process.

Virtual reality and collaborations in educational activities

Since the introduction of VR as an experiential way that allows users to interact with the contexts (Bricken 1991), VR has been used for supporting various simulations, concepts and ideas visualizations, group projects, field trips, and other related educational activities (Thorsteinsson and Page 2007). Numbers of research studies and practical solutions have afforded learners the abilities to interact and collaborate within simulated environments of varied fidelity and immersiveness depending on the VR technologies used. For example, e-REAL (2021) offers state-of-the-art solutions for health care, business, industry, and education using its unique bare-eye visual storytelling techniques to bring the virtual and the real together with full immersion enabling collaborations and interactions for the users. Menck et al. (2012) introduces an immersive VR supported approach to enhancing factory planning featuring distance collaborations and social interactions.

Multi-user virtual environments (MUVE) for education

Since the introduction of the multi-user virtual environments (MUVE), researchers and practitioners have been applying such environments to provide innovative approaches for people to interact with others, to learn from the environment, and to construct their knowledge of the world. MUVEs are afforded by different forms of VR, such as web-based applications (e.g., Mozilla Hubs), desktop 3D virtual environment (e.g., SecondLife), and VR with HMDs (e.g., ENGAGE). One of the salient places for MUVE research and practices is at the education sector, in which learning content can be simulated, real-life contexts can be created and repeated, physical and social interactions can be achieved, and details can be deliberately included (Garris et al. 2002; Teoh 2012). In the educational settings, 3D desktop MUVEs such as SecondLife and OpenSimulator are used to teach content knowledge (e.g., Chen 2016; Halvorson et al. 2011; Wang and Braman 2009; Zhang 2013), train pre-service teachers or student instructors (e.g., Gregory and Masters 2012; Ke and Xu 2020; Muir et al. 2013), help students with special needs (e.g., Ke et al. 2015; Wang et al. 2018; Moon et al. 2020), and so on. One of the foundational theories underneath these studies is the constructionists’ point of view which believes that the effective understanding of the world happens when people actively engage meaningful interactions with the environment around them (Papert and Harel 1991). Such interactions would include both with the non-human environment and with the people around.

There is mature evidence that MUVEs bring engagement and sense of community among the participants in a simulated space (Baker et al. 2009; Steinkuehler and Williams 2006). In VR, users may coexist, communicate, and interact with each other. Hence, the VR naturally plays as a social medium affording such social activities (Biocca and Levy 2013; Oh et al. 2018). Steuer (1992) introduced the idea of telepresence as the experience of the presence in the environments created by technologies such as the computers. When studying virtual environments, Slater (1999) noticed the subjective sensation of “being there” and the sense of participating in a realistic experience—presence. In the context of graduation celebration, interactions with the school environment, peers, and professors would be key factors that the students perceive that they are actually present at the celebration, in which the notion of social presence plays an important role. Later researchers further studied presence from three perspectives—telepresence, self-presence, and social presence (Lee 2004). On top of Steuer (1992), telepresence relates to how vivid and transparent (not feeling the existence of the technology) the experience can be brought by the VR technology; self-presence refers to how much a user feels he/she is actually him/herself in the VR environment; and social presence concerns how a user perceives his/her virtual experience with others—peers, social activities, and social identities (Oh et al. 2018). In a recent systematic review on social presence in VR, the authors acknowledged the critical role that social presence plays in users’ VR experience, and further detailed the discussions of numerous attributes that construct social presence, namely interactivity, social cues, visual representation, psychological traits, technical issues, personality and agency, and others (Oh et al. 2018).

Purpose of the study

The purpose of this current case study had twofold. First, it was to offer a timely and feasible solution for all the stakeholders during the graduating season to social and to enjoy the highlight moment through a fun, interactive, and safe approach during such a specific time period. Second, the researcher anticipated to see how participants would experience VRGC pertaining to the usability, cognitive involvement, and performances, and how they would comment on the feasibility and potentials of VRGC. This paper would be one of the first scholarly products that delineates the design and implementation of a VR-based graduation celebration amidst the pandemic and reports the empirical findings accordingly. It is expected to be serving as a reference for researchers and practitioners who strive to apply handy VR technologies to different aspects of life and to offer alternative solutions during time like this during the pandemic.

Methodology

VRGC design

The VRGC design was conducted under the following guidelines with both flexibilities and constrains. Such guidelines were derived from the planning meetings between the college administration and the designing team.

The VRGC serves as a complementary activity to the university’s official graduation activities in the pandemic enabled by general social media like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Zoom.

It is unofficial, and there will not be any activities that resemble the actual commencement within the VRGC.

It is a playground for the graduating students, faculty, and staff members to mingle with social distance in the physical world but without it in VRGC. The in-VR activities are expected to be fun, engaging, and interactive.

The developing team had very limited time for the realization of VRGC. The entire planning, designing, testing, and deploying time was less than ten days. After carefully inspecting the guidelines, the team found the aforementioned attributes of social presence (Oh et al. 2018) particularly useful and applicable for the design and implementation of the VR graduating celebration in this context. Team discussions led to the following instances of the attributes within the VRGC (Table 1).

Table 1

Social presence in VRGC

Attributes of social presence	Instances in VRGC
Interactivity	Real-time communication and interactions
Social cues	Identity recognition Picture and graffiti walls Contextual (departmental affiliations, graduates of 2020, etc.) factor
Visual representation	VR environment resembling real campus and activities
Psychological traits	Tendency to accept technology and to actively embrace immersions
Technical issues	Software compatibility, network access, computer resources, etc
Personality and agency	Avatars’ appearances reminding each individual and showing themselves who they are Full control of in VR activities

Generally, the construction of VRGC comprised three parts (see Fig. 3):

Fig. 3

VRGC design

Infrastructure construction

A dedicated server space was used for VRGC, and the OpenSimulator Release0.9.1.1 (2020) was installed on it. Within the virtual world, part of the University of Missouri campus area was constructed on one OpenSimulator island. Following the design guide of visual presentation for social presence (see Table 1), the architectural team designed a virtual campus square featuring the most salient buildings and representing constructions of the university with five department buildings surrounding it. The MU visual identities (color scheme, mascot, slogans, etc.) were embedded anywhere as needed. Figure 1 shows the main virtual ground where VRGC took place and what the environment looked like.

Fig. 1

VRGC at a glance—bird’s-eye view (upper two); department buildings (middle two); snacks corner (lower left); amphitheater stage place (lower right)

Activity and scenario design

The activity design was where social cues related to graduation needed to be embedded in order to offer the participants a sound experience of social presence. The celebration was set to take place during a 2-h time frame on the evening of the Friday of graduation. There was a blend of synchronous and asynchronous events and activities on the schedule, so as to create a live event experience while also allowing the participants to come in late or leave early as they preferred to. Some highlights of the activities were the college dean’s on-site speech, group photograph taking, selfie stands, and graffiti walls. Here is a summary of the planned activities (Table 2).

Table 2

VRGC major activities

6:00–6:20	Get logged in Explore—orient yourself to the controls and environment (if needed) Socialize with students and/or faculty and staff you recognize
6:20–6:25	Make your way to the amphitheater area (i.e., stage and seats in front of the columns). Feel free to take a seat and relax when you get there
6:25–6:30	Welcome and congratulatory address from the Dean (location: amphitheater stage, in front of the columns)
6:30–6:40	Group photo with the Dean at the stage
6:40–6:45	Watch prepared celebration videos from College faculty and staff (location: amphitheater screen; click on the screen to play video)
6:45–8:00	Visit the building for your specific academic program (follow signage around the perimeter of the central space to find your building) Activities: Make your mark by adding messages, images, photos, videos, etc. to the “signature wall”—and view messages left by others from the program Watch photo slideshows featuring program graduates Take a snapshot in front of the Picture Pose station—take individual and/or group photos with friends and faculty as you feel comfortable Visit any other academic program buildings as your interest or curiosity leads you to Further explore the VRGC environment and socialize with participants as you so desire, but know that you can leave whenever you are ready—there are no more scheduled events past this point

Within VRGC, participants communicated with each other through either text messages or real-time voice chats. The entire VRGC was video recorded and uploaded to a securely shared online folder so that students of class spring 2020 who missed the event could access to watch the VR celebration at their will. The in-VR photographs taken were also uploaded to a secured cloud storage and shared with the students (see Fig. 2 for example) who have registered the event.

Fig. 2

Selected VRGC activities—dean’s speech (upper two); group photo and selfie (lower two)

Directions for participation

The team carefully developed a startup guide and need-to-know document to communicate with the participants before the VRGC event (see Appendix A for an excerption; email author for a complete document). The document informed the participants with detailed directions on how to download, install, and configure a client-side viewer to get access to the VR server for the event. Tips for the in-VR operations and necessary netiquette were presented. The document also provides links to an abundance of videos created by the team to walk the participants through these steps for the setup and in-VR manipulations. An activity guide (see Appendix B) was provided to the participants to give them an idea about what to do and what was expected within the environment. An optional orientation/preview session on how to navigate and communicate within the VRGC was offered the evening before the Friday celebration.

Research design

A mixed method was used in the research design for this case study. Demographic data of the participants were collected through a pre-survey before the intervention. A post-survey composed of questionnaires pertaining to cognitive load, user experience, and technology acceptance was applied after they finished VRGC. The questionnaires (see tables in the results section) were excerpted and adapted from Hart (2006) for cognitive load, Chertoff et al. (2010) for virtual performance, and Park (2009) for technology acceptance. Three text-based interview questions followed the survey for more in-depth qualitative data from the participants on how they perceived their VRGC experience, how it could be compared with the traditional graduation celebration, and what could be improved. Descriptive data of the questionnaire answers were reported and discussed. Qualitative data from the interview were fed into the NVivo (2020) software for further thematic analyses. The research passed an expedited University of Missouri IRB review and was granted the green light to proceed.

VRGC participants

VRGC was a voluntary event open for all College of Education spring 2020 graduating students, as well as the faculty and staff. Fifty-five users registered the event, and 21 joined the event at the scheduled time. However, only 11 participants finished all the activities and completed both the pre- and post-surveys because of their individual time planning and family matters. Although a high dropout rate, it was not surprising at all with the pandemic status quo going on in mid-May 2020. Meanwhile, in the text-based interview questions, one student participant disclosed that s/he had never got fully connected to the celebration. Consequently, the corresponding data was treated as an outlier and removed from the data pool for further analyses. Hence, we finally conducted the analyses on the data from 10 participants.

Results and findings

Among the 10 participants, there were 9 females and 1 male, 4 of them graduating students, 5 faculty members, and 1 staff. Information collected from the pre-survey informed that, before the COVID-19 pandemic, they spent an average of 7 h weekly in socializing with people other than their family members. While the pandemic was going on, such time dropped to 2 h only (a 72% decrease rate). Most of them (80%) felt stressed lately after the pandemic outbreak.

Survey questions

For the post-survey questions, Table 3 tells their perceived cognitive load during the VRGC. Generally, the VRGC participants did not encounter much mental pressure or spend much cognitive load in participating the activities, which implied a reduced extraneous cognitive load. This afforded them to concentrate more on the graduation celebration itself and to enjoy the social interactivities.

Table 3

VRGC cognitive load perception

Questions	Scorea
How much mental and perceptual activity was required? Were the activities easy or demanding, simple or complex?	2.5 (SD = 1.08)
How much time pressure did you feel due to the pace at which the activities or activity elements occurred? Was the pace slow or rapid?	2.3 (SD = 1.06)
How hard did you have to work mentally to accomplish your level of performance?	2.3 (SD = 1.06)
How successful were you in performing the activities? How satisfied were you with your performance?	4.0 (SD = 0.82)

aMean scores: 1—very low, 5—very high

Table 4 informs how accomplishing the participants perceived their performances were. They were quite confident and satisfied in how they performed, especially in familiarizing themselves with the VRGC environment and in completing the designated activities.

Table 4

VRGC performance self-evaluation

Questions	Scorea
Controlling my avatar's movement	3.7 (SD = 1.34)
Completing the celebration activities	4.4 (SD = 0.52)
Familiarizing myself with the environment	4.4 (SD = 0.52)
Socializing with peers and other characters/avatars	3.8 (SD = 0.79)

aMean scores: 1—strongly disagree, 5—strongly agree

Table 5 shows the participants’ levels of technology acceptance, in this case, how much they regarded the VRGC system as technologically sound, functionally acceptable, and practically implementable.

Table 5

VRGC technology acceptance

Questions	Scorea
I find that VRGC is very easy to use	3.7 (SD = 1.06)
I find that the human computer interface of VRGC is clear and easy to understand	3.6 (SD = 0.97)
I feel confident in interacting with peers and the environment in this VRGC	4.0 (SD = 0.82)
I feel that using virtual reality to host graduation celebration is a good idea	4.0 (SD = 0.67)
I intend to use VRGC as the substitute of the real graduation ceremony	1.8 (SD = 0.92)

aMean scores: 1—strongly disagree, 5—strongly agree

Text-based interview questions

Regarding the interview questions, the researcher examined how the participants perceived their VRGC experience, how it could be compared with the traditional graduation celebration (if no pandemic), and what to improve. The participants contributed numerous feedbacks and constructive ideas.

Question 1—How was your overall experience with the VRGC?

All participants expressed positive comments in their VRGC experience. A typical compliment from the students read,

I can’t say “Thank you” enough to the TELL [development] team. This was the highlight of my graduation weekend. It was so much fun. I really enjoyed meeting the team as well. All of you are so welcoming! Great job.

And a representing comment from the faculty and staff read, “I really enjoyed the opportunity to explore the environment and chatting with graduating students in our department.”

Question 2—Given the fact that you might have attended any form of graduation ceremony or celebration before, how would you compare it with this VRGC?

Comparing VRGC with the traditional graduation activities, the participants brought up various thoughts with a mixture of both positive and negative comments. Some participants put,

I'm a … who likes to sit at my computer so this was great! I didn't have to go anywhere or pay to travel. I originally made arrangements to attend commencement in Columbia but I wasn't the least bit sad about not being able to. You made it ok!,

while some others expressed,

I'm sorry, but it was nothing like any graduation ceremony I have ever seen. Yes, there was a video and small speech given, but the part that people enjoy about graduations is seeing themselves/their loved ones being honored for graduating. This one felt very impersonal and the speeches made were just blanket statements that could have been applied to any graduating class.

Question 3—Is there anything that you would like to do differently with the VRGC?

With the answers to this question, the participants provided many constructive inputs for the improvement of VRGC. From the students’ perspective, they hoped that some actual activities like those in a real-world commencement, such as calling names to go to the stage and showing names of graduating students on a board, could have been designed and implemented in VRGC, although such activities were not authorized as to make it unofficial per the planning meeting guidelines. They also suggested more involvement of the faculty, especially those who taught them, as well as the families of the graduating students. An example comment was,

Make it like a real graduation ceremony. There was a stage and the dean was there, so I think it would have been nice for them to call our names and have us virtually walk across the stage. To make sure the names called were people that were actually present, there could be a signup board where you write your name.

From the faculty and staff members’ perspective, they proposed encouraging more students to join this virtual celebration. An example was, “I think we need faculty to encourage student participation so more would try it out.”

Discussions and conclusions

In this paper, the researcher introduces the design and implementation of a 3D VR-enabled graduating celebration serving a complement to a series of the University of Missouri online spring graduating activities during the COVID-19 pandemic. The purpose of VRGC was for the spring 2020 graduating students to social with the restriction on social distance going on because of the pandemic, and to have a fun and engaging place to share their excitement of graduation. Dozens of students and faculty showed interests and registered for the celebration. However, because of all kinds of uncertainties and people’s change of schedules during that hard period of time, only 10 participants went through VRGC and contributed their answers to the survey and interview questions.

Quantitative data from the surveys revealed that the participants perceived low cognitive load involvement during the VRGC activities, and rated their performance as satisfied (Table 3). Although the 3D VR technology used in this study was not new, it owned a couple of advantages to ease the users’ participation, which led to a low cognitive load consumption. Firstly, the VRGC did not require much software and hardware configurations at the users’ side, which was not the case for some of the latest VR technologies like the Oculus and the VIVE that consume a substantial amount of computing resources. This made the technology much more reachable as long as a user had a consumer-level computer and a stable access to the Internet. Such a technology was also less cybersickness-prone than some of its HMD-based counterparts. Second, the users simply used mice and keyboards to do their in-VR operations, which was what people nowadays are used to during their daily lives. Meanwhile, the VRGC offered both text- and voice-based means of communication for the participants. Such features made VRGC very user-friendly so that the participants were able to concentrate more on the activities of celebration themselves rather than spending too much mental and physical efforts on the maneuvering of the VR operations. Consequently, the extraneous cognitive load (Sweller 1994, 2010) was minimized, and a sound telepresence (Oh et al. 2018; Lombard and Ditton 2006; Steuer 1992) was reached. Such a cognitive perception was also echoed in the participants’ responses to the interview questions as no one actually complained the mental and physical effort spent on the VRGC.

At the same time, it is also encouraging to see that the participants showed satisfaction and confidence in both VR operations and the activities in VRGC (Table 4). All scores were above the mean, and the participants were specifically satisfied in exploring the VR environment and completing the designed activities. They also felt contented controlling their own avatars and socializing with peers in the VRGC environment. In their answers to the interview questions, the participants expressed their appreciation of the school and university identities within the VR, their pleasant chatting with peers and faculty, and the welcoming environment in general.

For the technology acceptance (Table 5), the participants found that the VRGC was simple to use and easy to interact with peers. They also regarded it a good idea to host a graduation celebration within a VR environment. The above-average scores for the first four questions indicated an attitude of acceptance of the VRGC from the participants. However, they did not think it a good idea to use VRGC as a substitute or replacement of the real graduation ceremony. Clues to this discrepancy could be found in their answers to the interview questions.

With the help of the NVivo software, answers to the text-based interview questions were categorized and coded according to the attributes (interactivity, social cues, visual representation, psychological traits, technical issues, and personality and agency) of social presence (Oh et al. 2018). One more code (general comments) was added to host those answers that did not fall into any one of the attributes. Example results are shown in Table 6.

Table 6

VRGC text-based interview answers

Codes/attributes	Example answers
Interactivity	I really enjoyed the opportunity … chatting with graduating students in our department
Social cues	Get more faculty involved. It was nice to see our dean there, but I would really have liked to see one of my own professors. I didn't know any of the other faculty members and was kind of hoping to see my own methods professor or student teaching university supervisor
Visual representation	The photo backgrounds were cute. The video was well done and a nice touch
Psychological traits	I'm a … who likes to sit at my computer so this was great! I didn't have to go anywhere or pay to travel. I originally made arrangements to attend commencement [on-site] but I wasn't the least bit sad about not being able to. You made it ok!
Technical issues	When I opened the avatar and outfit window, to try to change my default clothing, the software froze—not my computer/mouse, just the software. I could even hear colleagues talking to me but all my controls were frozen!
Personal and agency	Give us Graduation outfits … Giving us a default graduation gown would be a great way to make it feel more real and like a ceremony. I think getting to change your avatars face and body is great, and it can allow us to feel like we can personalize our avatars even if we can't edit our clothing
General comments	In-person gatherings are discouraged at the moment, so this was the best graduation ceremony in spring 2020! It seized an opportunity well I do not think it could ever replace an actual in person graduation. It was nice to have some sort of celebration, but it is just not the same as an actual graduation ceremony

Among all the answers to the interview questions, 36 pieces of text entries were coded. For some of the traits, participants expressed their perceptions from different perspectives that the researcher further coded as positive and non-positive. It should be noted that most of the non-positive comments were suggestions and anticipations which did not actually happen in this current VRGC. The following Fig. 4 shows how such answers were distributed.

Fig. 4

Categorized answers to the interview questions

The coded interview entries helped the interpretation of the quantitative data and better understanding of the participants’ anticipations in this case study. Regarding the virtual environment, activities of celebration, and technology affordances provided in VRGC, the participants established positive experiences. In this virtual celebration, the environment was created symbolizing major constructions of the university and exhibiting the university color schemes. The participants appeared as avatars representing themselves and had conversations with each other mostly in real-time voices. For instance, the college dean appeared as an avatar wearing her outfit customized to be consistent with her real-world appearance in both color and style. Some participants also utilized the gesturing functions (e.g., shaking hands, waving, smiling, etc.) within the VRGC leading to some embodied experiences. Such features helped the participants establish and recognize their social identity and personality (Jin 2012; Verhagen et al. 2014) in VRGC. Participants could raise more sense of affiliation to the university and the college, which would in turn increase their social presence.

It is understandable to see that most of the non-positive entries in the traits of general comments, personality and agency, and social cues were related the participants’ anticipation to include real graduation commencement activities such as calling names one by one, showing individual identity on bulletin boards, walking across the stage, and hearing family yelling from the crowd. The researcher acknowledges that these should be the essence of graduation celebration, and the key component of social presence and interaction in VR-enabled scenarios. The lack of such components should have been the major reason why participants were not optimistic of using VRGC as the replacement of the real graduation ceremony even during the pandemic when social distance was required. However, it should be noted that because of the restraints of not making this VRGC formal and official with activities resembling a real-world commencement (due to the uncertainties in the coming months), the current case did not completely fulfill the anticipations of the participants.

As a conclusion, this case study on a 3D VR-enabled graduation celebration satisfied the goal of bringing a timely and feasible solution for the graduating students and their faculty to compensate the regret of the cancelation of the spring 2020 commencement because of the COVID-19. It also offered researchers and practitioners inspirations to help solving problems like those raised during the pandemic with existing and low-cost VR technologies. In the field of instructional technologies, researchers and practitioners strive to work on how to use technologies to help people engage in educational activities. The design and deployment of a technology-enabled educational solution features a systematic approach with the considerations of technology choices, instructional theoretical guidelines, logistics and resources available, time and policy restraints, and others. This case study demonstrated an example of such an approach. In the meantime, for the current design of VRGC, the participants expressed satisfaction in the activities of celebration and their performances among them. They also provided suggestions on how to improve the VR-enabled graduation celebration. In a mail that the researcher received after the VRGC, a student expressed “Thank you TELL team for putting together an amazing virtual campus experience! I really enjoyed it, and probably would not have had the opportunity to meet all of you if you had not done this. Side note: my first project for my master's program was a proposal for a VR training for first responders. Thanks for letting me see what is possible.”. Since many of our graduate students are schoolteachers and instructional designers who are working very closely with real-world problems, this VRGC experience could serve as a teasing example and bring them ideas to help with their work during the pandemic or anytime as needed.

Limitations and future research

There were limitations to this case study. The first was the lack of “formal” commencement-like activities implemented for a best experience. The second limitation was that the data pool for the discussion of this case study turned out to be too small to draw any solid conclusions with statistical power. The unbalance between sexes (9 females and 1 male) might have introduced bias into the participants’ responses to the questions. The results reported could simply reflect some trends in the corresponding aspects. Readers are suggested to use proper judgment when digesting the study results and discussions. Third, the technology used in this project is not new, without the latest VR end devices involved such as those more immersive HMDs which might bring divergent experiences to the participants.

Despite the limitations mentioned above, the VRGC turned out to be a practically feasible application of virtual reality to address instant problems like those under the pandemic. This case study is anticipated to be one of the first published studies dedicated to VR-enabled graduation celebration amidst the COVID-19 pandemic and to serve as a timely reference for researchers and practitioners in the field. Future studies are suggested to host VR celebrations with more real-life activities and to have more students and professors to participate if circumstance permits. Latest immersive VR technologies are encouraged to be explored in cases like this while balancing the issues such as technical resources, feasibility, logistics, time for development, and institutional policies. VR applications to help address other problems brought by the pandemic are also encouraged.

Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.

Supplementary file 1. Appendix A. Startup Guide and Need-to-Know Info (excerption) (PDF 317 kb)

Supplementary file 2. Appendix B: Schedule of Events.