ClassComet: Exploring and Designing AI-generated Danmaku in Educational Videos to Enhance Online Learning

Danmaku, users’ live comments synchronized with, and overlaying on videos, has recently shown potential in promoting online video-based learning. However, user-generated danmaku can be scarce—especially in newer or less viewed videos—and its quality is unpredictable, limiting its educational impact. This paper explores how large multimodal models (LMM) can be leveraged to automatically generate effective, high-quality danmaku. We first conducted a formative study to identify the desirable characteristics of content- and emotion-related danmaku in educational videos. Based on the obtained insights, we developed ClassComet, an educational video platform with novel LMM-driven techniques for generating relevant types of danmaku to enhance video-based learning. Through user studies, we examined the quality of generated danmaku and their influence on learning experiences. The results indicate that our generated danmaku is comparable to human-created ones, and videos with both content- and emotion-related danmaku showed significant improvement in viewers' engagement and learning outcome.