Supervised vs Unsupervised Learning on Gaze Data to Classify Student Distraction Level in an Educational VR Environment

Educational VR may help students by being more engaging or improving retention compared to traditional learning methods. However, a student can get distracted in a VR environment due to stress, mind-wandering, unwanted noise, external alerts, etc. Student eye gaze can be useful for detecting these distraction. We explore deep-learning-based approaches to detect distractions from gaze data. We designed an educational VR environment and trained three deep learning models (CNN, LSTM, and CNN-LSTM) to gauge a student’s distraction level from gaze data, using both supervised and unsupervised learning methods. Our results show that supervised learning provided better test accuracy compared to unsupervised learning methods.