ClassMeta: Designing Interactive Virtual Classmate to Promote VR Classroom Participation

Peer influence plays a crucial role in promoting classroom participation, where behaviors from active students can contribute to a collective classroom learning experience. However, the presence of these active students depends on several conditions and is not consistently available across all circumstances. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT have demonstrated the ability to simulate diverse human behaviors convincingly due to their capacity to generate contextually coherent responses based on their role settings. Inspired by this advancement in technology, we designed ClassMeta, a GPT-4 powered agent to help promote classroom participation by playing the role of an active student. These agents, which are embodied as 3D avatars in virtual reality, interact with actual instructors and students with both spoken language and body gestures. We conducted a comparative study to investigate the potential of ClassMeta for improving the overall learning experience of the class.