Teaching and Learning Immersion and Presence

It is known since Socrates that people learn better by experiencing a problem by themselves and by finding a (the) solution(s) by their own. It is however not always possible to offer such freedom to students when teaching the concepts of immersion and presence in virtual environments due to the technological complexity and the intrinsically subjective nature of these concepts. This paper describes a pedagogical experiment involving a standard videoconferencing system and presents easily reproducible exercises intended to let students experiment with an immersive system, experience the feeling of tele-presence, and observe the inherent problems liked to  communication, field of view, or latency issues. The test performed shows that such experimentation have positive pedagogical impacts, both from the learning and students motivation perspectives.