VirtualClassroom: A Lecturer-Centered Consumer-Grade Immersive Teaching System in Cyber–Physical–Social Space

Lecturers, as the guidance of the classroom, play a significant role in the teaching process. However, the lecturers' sense of space immersion has been ignored in current virtual teaching systems. In this article, we explore the cyber-physical-social intelligence for Edu-Metaverse in cyber-physical-social space and specially design a lecturer-centered immersive teaching system, taking the social and lecturers' factors into consideration. We call this system VirtualClassroom (V-Classroom). Specifically, we first introduce the cyber-physical-social system (CPSS) paradigm of V-Classroom so that the workflow is standardized and significantly simplified, and the systems can be constructed with off-the-shelf hardware. The key component of V-Classroom is a cyber-world representation of a physical-world classroom instrumented with sparse consumer-grade RGBD cameras for capturing the 3-D geometry and texture of the classrooms. We provide each V-Classroom lecturer with a physical device for sending 6DoF view-change messages and showing view-dependent content of the remote classroom. Following the above paradigm, we develop the V-Classroom algorithms, including V-Classroom depth algorithm (V-DA) and V-Classroom view algorithm (V-VA), to achieve the real-time rendering of remote classrooms. V-DA is dedicated to recovering accurate depth information of the classrooms while V-VA is devoted to real-time novel view synthesis. Finally, we illustrate our implemented CPSS-driven V-Classroom prototype, based on real-world classroom scenarios we collected, and discuss the main challenges and future direction.