Ching & Krause (2026). Evaluating Tang Poem Comprehension of Foreigners in Holistically Designed Spatial Experience in Virtual Reality. In HCI Int. 2025

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Ching, C., & Krause, A. F. (2026). Evaluating Tang Poem Comprehension of Foreigners in Holistically Designed Spatial Experience in Virtual Reality. In International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (pp. 136-147). Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-12764-8_12

Abstract

Virtual Reality (VR) is an intuitive and natural Human-Computer Interaction interface that can facilitate learning, entertainment, simulation and humanities. But it is often resource-demanding to design, develop and evaluate. In previous study, by expressing a Classical-Chinese-written Tang poem “Snow on the River” (SOR) via storytelling in English and holistically designed spatial experience in VR, a VR experience for reading SOR was created, and a design methodology for creating a VR for reading Tang poetry was generalized.

A statistical evaluation of usability and user experience (UX) of the design methodology was however pending. A User Experiment was therefore subsequently designed to answer two main research questions: RQ1. Can Holistic VR Poem Reading enhance foreigners’ Tang poem reading comprehension compared with reality-based and VR-based plain-text flip books? RQ2. Does Holistic VR Poem Reading provide better UX than plain-text flip books?

120 university students without prior knowledge of Chinese languages will be recruited and assigned into three groups: Experimental Group engages with the SOR-VR; Control Group 1 only reads the same texts from VR-based flip book while Control Group 2 only from a real paper book. Through observation, comprehension tests, UX questionnaires and interviews, quantitative and qualitative data will be collected for statistical analysis. Eye-tracking and ECG data will also be collected to empower future studies.

Our study aims to contribute to the growing body of research on VR reading and its potential to make literary works written in Classical Chinese more accessible.