| Summary: | The sharing of ideas, collaborative making, and serendipitous discussions and groupings are essential elements that foster creativity and growth among student cohorts. This applies specially to design- and/or engineering-related courses. Enabling these features is a unique requirement for creating a virtual communication platform tailored towards corresponding programs. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we tested various virtual platforms in the context of design engineering education to deliver online courses. However, traditional teleconferencing platforms like Zoom and Microsoft Teams - which were used on the daily basis - showed limitations in terms of interaction opportunities, group-based communication, and customisability. In previous work, we successfully tested a Spatialized Video Communication Platform which was resembling a 2D video game-like interaction: Gather.town. In this work, we extended this approach in a test study into the third dimension using two existing Virtual Reality-based platforms (Horizon Workrooms and Spatial) aiming to improve serendipitous interactions, group-based communication and quick group formation in distance teaching and learning. We conducted a workshop with each platform and collected student feedback with a questionnaire survey. We also ask the participants to relate their experiences to the earlier used Gather.town platform. Our finding showed that immersion is a crucial factor that impacts the effectiveness of group work in distance learning. However, we still found that there is a lot of potential for improvements before these frameworks can be used on a regular basis for teaching. This paper presents our applications and analysis of the two platforms and contributes insights on how to build a virtual studio environment for an interdisciplinary master's programme in design engineering. © 2023 Society for Imaging Science and Technology. All rights reserved.
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