Virtual Reality in the Classroom

• What we at Trent have done

• What is available for purchase but is still really useful

Two Categories For Today

• Google Cardboard

• Gear VR (Samsung only)

• Vive/Rift/Microsoft augmented Reality headsets

• Sony PlayStation VR

• HoloLens

Hardware

• Student Group Projects: HTC Vive, Oculus (Facebook) Rift

• One student (Alexandre Karimov) has a couple of Hololenses and has

done some cool stuff on his own, and as part of hackathons

Our Focus

• VR anatomy

• Forensic reconstruction

• We’ve seen some work in games (including VR) seeing experiments

for things like training retail for black Friday, firefighters for gas

leaks/attacks etc.

VR for Training

• Movement

• Interaction

• Controls

Practical Design Problems

1. Controller/gamepad/keyboard. At high speeds this is really jarring,

weirdly

2. Just walking around. Constrained by cables/space

3. Point -> Teleport. Works well but isn’t smooth motion in the

experience

4. Automatic (where the game just moves you around). Depending on

the thing this can be very nausea inducing

Movement

Controls And Interaction

• Can’t actually throw controller

• Not the same mass

• Shape/Feel is wrong

• Depth and scale perception in

3D/VR

• There are now many video games (some which are actually good)

using VR

• All of them struggle with the same issues we faced

Video Games

• Tripping

• Pulling

• Punching

• Nausea

Safety Issues in VR

• We set up shop in GCS 105

• Hopefully people had time to give it a go before now, because it looks

like this talk was scheduled towards the end of the day.

• We have both our own student projects (and one of the guys who

helped build one, who’s a Peterborough boy named Sean Baxter) and

a number of commercial products that are worth playing with.

Try For Yourself!