A VR/AR Physics Lab Teaching Assistant: Platform Considerations
MRNews
In an undergraduate physics lab, often the student goes back and forth between a manual and the complex piece of equipment, scratching their head over which sequence of buttons and knobs the manual is referring to. An AR teaching aid with pop up arrows and documentation around the equipment might be helpful. Equally, a VR model of a piece of equipment sensitive to abuse would be helpful in training.
Persona:
Age: 21
Occupation: Physics undergraduate student
Name: Alex
Quote: “I can learn anything as long as the manual makes sense.”
Motivation: Alex is learning to be an experimental physicist. She really needs to get her experiment for this lesson working but the densely written manual doesn’t explain the settings she needs. She has a heavy course load and not a lot of time to figure out how this particular piece of equipment works and why. She learns best by doing and copying what someone else is doing, but the teacher is busy.
Experience with VR: tried a Rift once
How accessible would each VR platform be to your target student in terms of price? Take into account location, age, and income.
Since the budgets of both an undergraduate physics teaching lab and a university student are limited, a mobile platform would be best. It would be hard to justify purchasing a high immersion HMD for one app, let alone one for each experiment concurrently running. Also, there would be no need for controllers.
How interactive does your lesson need to be? For example, do I need to pick things up or could I get away with just looking at objects?
The interaction with the app would ideally be through the app responding to the actions of the student based on the app’s instructions. For example, the app indicates that a knob needs to be turned to 90, and the app can verify that this is done. At the most basic level the student would advance the app’s instructions themselves by pushing the trigger.
How realistic do your visuals need to be in order to teach? For example, could I use 2D images and videos in a 3D Environment or do you need high poly 3D models.
The visuals of the app itself (i.e. the arrows and text) can be simple, like the Google Expedition guidance. In the absence of equipment, for a VR experience a student could interact with a box or other primitive model textured with a reasonable resolution photo of the equipment.
Does my student need to feel like a participant in the experience or can they be a passive viewer? Could they be both?
It’s best that the student interact with the equipment and observe what happens with different settings. They could also watch a guided tour of a 3D model of the equipment, but that would be like watching a 2D video. If the equipment is especially sensitive to abuse, the student could interact with a VR version of the equipment.
Given the answers above, what are potential platforms you could use for your experience?
The most accessible platform for this experience would be mobile.
[This post was written to partially fulfill requirements for the Udacity VR Developer Nanodegree. This was cross-posted to my quest log.]
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