Virtual Reality Physics Lab

Abstract

Virtual Reality has become a popular entertainment medium; however, it could also potentially be useful in creating interactive experiences that act as educational tools for students. Through the use of this technology, virtual experiences facilitate the learning of various concepts through interactive simulation. This project focuses on the development of a virtual reality application that can be used to help teach different physics concepts to young students, in engaging virtual environments and further promote STEM education principles. Each level developed for the game instructs on concepts such as force, acceleration, velocity, position, etc. This paper will discuss both the specifications and design of the project as well as discuss the initial demo results and future development.

The Design of Applying Gamification in an Immersive Virtual Reality Virtual Laboratory for Powder-Bed Binder Jetting 3DP Training

“…Compared to the research of [1,2,6,7,[10][11][12][13][14]16,17], in relation to medical surgery and sports simulation training, the trainee had a certain target for their training outcome because of the highly professional level and the actual seriousness of the training. At the same time, the aim of other chemistry and physics virtual laboratory research is not to enhance the sustainability of learning and learning motivation, but to evaluate VR applications with the study results and to solve the problem of training limitations in the real environment, which is why we achieved different results by using VR to develop teaching or training virtual laboratories.…”

“…Regarding the use of VR technology to build and develop a virtual laboratory, VR technology was used to build virtual laboratories in [1,2,6,7,[10][11][12][13][14]16,17], and there has been positive learning feedback from chemical education, medical training, STEM teaching and sports training. In the case of experimental simulation, proper simulation and simulation-based applications can usually enable students to easily express their true reactions, thereby increasing the speed of learning.…”

“…VR is also used in clinical training and developing the spatial skills of children with mobility impairments [12]. A few applications, including The Narrative-based, Immersive, Constructionist/Collaborative Environments (NICE) project [13] and Virtual Reality Physics Lab [14], have been developed for general education. A 3D, full-scale, highly interactive VR application titled Collaborative VR (CVR) [15] was implemented in a Risk Assessment course at Iowa State University.…”

“…For the consideration of many two-handed operations in real manipulations, we decide to apply immersive virtual reality (VR) technology of having two handheld controllers, in order to establish a powder-bed binder jetting 3D printer virtual laboratory. Many research studies [2,[6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15] denoted that VR not only eliminates temporal-spatial restrictions or volume limitations, but also provides two-handed interactions with virtual interactable objects within an immersive virtual environment in order to simulate a high cost, dangerous, micro/macro-level environment, and multiple scenarios beyond space and time. We decided to apply immersive VR technology to simulate the 3DP training environment and the interactions among multiple processes of 3DP machine operations.…”

“…Gamification was, initially, feature in the 3DP Training Virtual Reality Virtual Laboratory [16] prototype (in this paper, we call it the 3DP Training VRVL). Some studies [9][10][11][12][13][14][15] pointed out the active influence of VR in training and education, while others proposed that VR can improve students' degree of participation. Thus, in the virtual laboratory at the very start, we expected that the introduction of VR technology would provide students with sufficient learning motivation.…”