Our Project Proposal

Over the past couple of years, in-home Virtual Reality headsets have rapidly increased in quality as well as availability. With the introduction of the Oculus Rift Development Kit 1 in 2012, all a consumer would need to immerse themselves in a virtual environment was the $300 headset and a PC with adequate components. This is still largely true, but now the PC-tethered headsets provide a higher quality experience than they had before, and a number of new standalone and/or console/mobile dependent headsets exist that provide a great experience as well. Overall, VR has become more accessible and better as a whole over the last decade.

While the primary purpose for VR is gaming, there are increasing opportunities in the educational space for providing a virtual environment where students can take classes, either as a supplement or even a full replacement to an in-person based class. Our app has the potential to be a replacement to in-person classes, or could just be used as a supplement in order to foster greater interest and comprehension in the subject matter, as well as incorporated into hands-on labs to further these aims.

There are a few requirements that are necessary to implement for a working app, as well as a few Stretch goals that are not vital to the project, but would better illustrate our mission and goals for the app as an educational resource.

Requirements

• Be as interactive as possible in order to make full use of the virtual space
• Keep complexity of controls low to make the app easy to use, so that the user can focus on learning the concepts at hand
• Develop for Oculus Rift, because Oculus headsets are the second most popular headsets in use; while Sony’s PSVR is the most popular headset, it is more difficult to develop for
• Create 7 weeks of content. One week of content contains a lesson where physics concepts are introduced, a demo where students are encouraged to play with the new concept in different tangible ways, and a lab where students can perform experiments and record/analyze data
• Add a sandbox mode with content from all of the labs strewn about to encourage an open learning environment by combining lessons.

Stretch Goals

• Support Oculus Go, HTC Vive, or PSVR headsets
• Add more weeks of content
• Add online support for multiple users in the same environment
• Develop and use our own assets

User Stories

As an educator, I want to increase engagement with my class so that they can better understand the subject matter that we go over in class in a hands-on environment.

As a student, I want to have an interactive environment where I can play with the concepts I learn in class so that I can solidify the concepts I learned, as well as to have the ability to replay the sessions multiple times in order to really grasp the material.

As an institution, we want the software to be highly accessible on a variety of platforms so we can use it throughout our educational infrastructure.