## 2 Materials and Methods
### Development of the Application  
The application was custom-tailored for the subject \"Proyectos RII 1: Organizacion y Escenarios\", where students were assigned the task of designing a robotic system to improve the palletizing and strawberry packaging line process (for more details, refer to [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKQBlbZIsY8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKQBlbZIsY8)]([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKQBlbZIsY8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKQBlbZIsY8)), accessed on 2 August 2023). Consequently, the application's environment was carefully designed to provide an industrial setting, ensuring full immersion for the students throughout the experience. Additionally, it was crucial to allow each group of students the freedom to customize and modify their environment based on their unique robotic system elements, without any interference from other groups. To accomplish this, a multi-room application design was implemented, facilitating efficient collaboration during work and seamless access to specific environments. During presentations, it is crucial to create a sense of genuine interaction among users, which includes the ability both to listen to and to speak with others within the virtual environment. To achieve this immersive experience, avatars with expressive animations are seamlessly integrated. These avatars are designed to synchronize eye and mouth movements with the user's speech, providing a more lifelike communication experience. Additionally, the avatars are programmed to respond with arm and head movements based on the gestures made by the users, further enhancing the sense of realistic interaction. For this project, Meta [32] avatars were chosen, primarily because they were compatible with the Meta Quest 2 hardware used during the experiments [33]. However, it is essential to mention that other avatar options could have been used, without compromising the core objectives of the study. The focus remained on creating a dynamic and engaging communication environment during presentations, where users felt as though they were genuinely interacting with one other, leading to a more effective and immersive learning experience. Furthermore, the application accounts for the differences between virtual and real-world environments, especially in terms of space. Students and professors need to navigate the virtual world freely, despite potential obstacles in the real-world classroom setting, such as chairs and tables. As a result, the application is equipped with the functionality of \"teleporting\", allowing users to jump within the virtual space without physical movement in the real world. To provide users with maximum freedom and natural interactions, the application employs hand tracking technology. VR headsets with vision cameras can track users' hands and/or pupils, enabling specific hand gestures to control virtual elements and user movements in the virtual world. In this work, hand tracking was used to interact with the virtual environment and to perform actions like \"teleporting\" through a hand gesture. PhotonEngine [34] was employed, to implement the multi-user functionality of the application. In essence, PhotonEngine represents a cutting-edge multiplayer framework designed explicitly for real-time online gaming. Developed by Exit Games, it seamlessly enables multi-user functionality in various applications. Operating on a robust client-server model, PhotonEngine ensures fairness in gameplay, while its low-latency data transmission and scalability contribute to an immersive gaming experience. Furthermore, the framework supports a range of networking models and allows for cross-platform deployment, providing developers with extensive documentation and SDKs for effortless integration. As a result, PhotonEngine empowers developers to create interactive multiplayer games with unparalleled ease and efficiency. In light of the aforementioned details, Figure 1 illustrates the VR application provided as a template for the workgroups.