Virtual Reality Classroom

Inspiration

Online education is becoming more popular as of late due to how convenient it is to take classes no matter where you are. However, it lacks the social interactions that traditional classrooms provide that is crucial for younger students. My dad saw that I was taking some classes online, so he wanted me to inspire my middle-school-aged brother to take online classes as well. School at that age is a social learning experience that online education can't provide. This inspired me to want to create an engaging classroom environment for middle school and high school students. Virtual reality is currently the best platform for this experience, due to its fundamental feature of immersion in which the students feels like their peers are sitting at the desks next to them.

What it does

Virtual reality classroom is a virtual classroom where the teacher is able to give interactive presentations that are built to take advantage of virtual reality. The presentation system support traditional powerpoint slides, giving the teachers a way to naturally transition their current curriculums into virtual reality. More importantly, the presentation system also allows teachers to load interactive 3D object into the classroom as part of the presentation. These interactive objects could be a human brain model, a dissection frog, or anything that 3rd party VR app makers produce. The presentation system enables the teacher to teleport the class to any environment imaginable, allowing for virtual field trips or situation-based learning. The teacher can control the presentation easily while wearing a VR headset through gestures recognized by Myo. The teacher can swipe left and right through each slide, which could consist of a traditional powerpoint slide, a 3D object, and/or a 3D environment.

How I built it

We built this classroom in Unity in C#. We looked online for help on the majority of the tasks we had to do, and there were a lot of old guides that we followed.

Challenges I ran into

Our team had no prior knowledge of Unity or 3D game development prior to this hackathon, so we faced a lot of little issues that we had a hard time with due to our inexperience. For example, we had a few problems lighting up the classroom without glitchy shadows appearing everywhere and providing the multiplayer functionality. We also had some problems learning the technologies due to the lack of up to date resources online, since the oculus rift required a newer version of Unity. We originally planned on using the LeapMotion controller to provide the student the ability to manipulate the 3D objects, but it kept crashing our project so we weren't able to.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We managed to create the multiplayer environment successfully, and dynamically load 3D assets into the scene as part of the presentation. The skybox around the classroom provides a surprisingly real sense of being there in Greece or Japan or on top of mountains.

What I learned

We learned a lot about Unity and 3D game development. We also learned the hardware restrictions of the Myo and the LeapMotion.

What's next for VR Classroom

An online hub for developers to post their VR assets and for teachers to easily find these assets to apply to their curriculum. The multiplayer functionality is very crude right now, as it requires hosting a server on your machine and connecting via IP, we can improve by using Unity's new multiplayer server solution. Finally, we need to add hardware for the students to interact with the 3d objects, which could be in the form of Oculus Touch.