The presented study aspires to utilize the gradually validated immense potential of collaborative immersive virtual environments (CIVEs) in higher education when designing and conducting geography lessons. These particular lessons focused on hypsography. A Research through Design approach and relevant qualitative methodology were used as we engaged two groups of domain experts (experienced geography teachers) to validate both the learning scenarios and the virtual environment we used. The lessons were administered via eDIVE—a novel platform for collaborative learning and teaching in virtual reality of our own design. The teachers underwent a hypsography virtual lesson and were randomly divided into two groups to be compared, which differed in the level of structure given to the lesson (one group received detailed instructions on what task they were to solve, while the other was given a free hand in exploring the environment and activities it afforded). The teachers’ experiences were then summarized in a post-lesson reflection and a subsequent focus group following the tasks. The participants’ expertise allowed insights to be gained into their first-hand experience as students, as well as their expert view of the lesson from an educational point of view. Virtual reality’s implementation into teaching practice was the key topic of the discussion.

BACKGROUND Hospital wayfinding is a well-documented source of patient stress, yet people with sensory, cognitive, or mobility-related needs face additional information barriers that generic wayfinding research rarely resolves. Information uncertainty, rather than a simple lack of signage, has recently been proposed as a unifying construct for locating and diagnosing these barriers across the patient journey. OBJECTIVE This study empirically applied a Stage-Touchpoint-Uncertainty coding framework across two structurally contrasting hospitals to identify the elements that constitute information uncertainty during hospital navigation, how these elements are perceived and prioritized by patients with specific needs, and how the resulting uncertainty peaks can inform the prioritization of wayfinding interventions. METHODS We conducted a qualitative, multi-method study combining four rounds of data collection between May 2024 and July 2025 at two university hospitals differing in scale and spatial organization (Hospital A: more than 1,000 beds, decentralized multi-pavilion campus; Hospital B: 890-bed comprehensive center with a historic core). Methods comprised expert accessibility walkthroughs, website accessibility and usability testing with severely visually impaired users, user walkthroughs with mobile eye-tracking and think-aloud protocols, and focus groups homogeneous by impairment type (hearing, developmental or learning, mobility, elderly) evaluating candidate signage designs. In total, 40 participants took part, with a mean age of 38.9 years (range 21-75). RESULTS Observations were coded into a Stage-Touchpoint-Uncertainty matrix across five consolidated journey stages. We coded 451 stage-touchpoint events (Pre-arrival, n=40; Entry, n=59; En-route, n=241; Destination interface, n=84; Exit, n=27). Four cross-stage uncertainty mechanisms emerged: absence, equivocality, perceptual degradation, and cognitive-translation demand. Absence-based uncertainty concentrated in the digital Pre-arrival and physical Entry stages, while equivocality dominated the En-route, Destination, and Exit stages and was the single most frequent mechanism overall. Priorities diverged by impairment group: participants with visual impairment prioritized digital retrievability, the developmental/learning group prioritized redundant multi-channel coding, and the physical/mobility group prioritized functional-eligibility information. CONCLUSIONS Information uncertainty in hospital wayfinding is best characterized along two axes, journey stage and underlying mechanism, which together support stage-specific, mechanism-differentiated intervention design that is generalizable beyond the two hospitals studied, while prioritizing breakdowns corroborated across sources and impairment groups.

This paper presents the design and formative evaluation of English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) lesson prototypes conducted within immersive virtual environments (IVEs) and reports qualitative insights derived from this Research through Design (RtD) prototype evaluation study. The research involved the development and formative evaluation of prototype lessons grounded in pedagogical expertise and contemporary principles of IVE-based education. The findings identify features, tools, and platform functionalities that were perceived by expert participants as relevant to lesson feasibility, user experience, and prototype refinement, and that informed the design of a collaborative educational IVE. Conducted within a broader research project on education in immersive virtual spaces, the study employed a role reversal methodology in which four experienced EFL educators participated as learners. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and analyzed with attention to both the instructional design of the lessons and the operational characteristics of the IVE technology. A Research through Design (RtD) approach was used to iteratively refine the lesson prototypes. The results emphasize the need for systematic formative evaluation and practical testing of IVE-based educational tools before claims about pedagogical effectiveness can be made. Rather than providing generalizable evidence of pedagogical efficacy or policy-level recommendations, the study offers formative design insights, expert reflections, and directions for prototype refinement in EFL-oriented IVE instruction.