Attention Guidance In The Wild: An Experiment Testing Visual Guidance Cues for VR Field Trips at High Schools

We assess the effectiveness of attention guidance cues in a virtual field trip in high schools with real students. Three eye-tracked visual cues, previously considered in lab settings for their ability to guide and restore attention, are compared against a baseline of no cue in a VR field trip of a virtual solar plant. Such cues are commonly studied in abstract lab tasks and not in the context of maintaining attention in an educational environment or in such real-world deployments. Results suggest a difference in effectiveness between lab subjects and high school students.