By Juli Whetstone

I came into this class just looking at VR as an interesting topic and not really knowing much about it. I knew that it was becoming more popular, but I had never tried any kind of VR experience until I bought my Google Cardboard headset for this class. Looking back now, it is crazy to think how far I have come.

As a Media & Education grad student, I approached this class as a way for me to explore how VR can be used for education. I think that VR can be a really powerful learning tool for students. While researching this during the class, I have found that there is not a huge focus on education in the VR community. I think part of this is that schools don’t have the money to pay for VR technology, or teachers may not even be aware that it exists. So with this in mind, for my final project I wanted to create a experience that would teach about a topic. Initially I was more interested in 360 video, but I saw more potential with creating an educational experience in Unity.

I realized that science would be a cool subject to examine with VR. It could be more engaging than just reading about scientific topics from a textbook. I really wanted to create something that not every student would be able to experience for themselves. From here, I started off thinking I could create the solar system. This proved to be a much bigger challenge than I had anticipated. Even though there are Unity assets for the planets, it was a struggle to figure out how to recreate the sizes and distances accurately. I also wanted them to orbit. This all just proved to be too complicated for my limited experience. I wanted it to be factually accurate, which I think is one of the greatest challenges with educational VR (and something that has also come up when talking about CGI and journalism). After fighting with it for awhile, I decided it would be better to switch topics. There are already VR and AR experiences that deal with the solar system, and there was no way I could compete with them.

I tried not to get discouraged by my struggles with the solar system and went back to the drawing board. While looking through the asset store, I saw there were particle systems available for weather. Even though students can experience weather in their daily lives, I saw this as an opportunity to teach them about how weather actually works. I started off trying to use some of the free assets available, but they just didn’t seem to work that well or didn’t look good. Luckily Professor Pacheco was able to purchase a better set of weather assets for me (thank you!). I found that that really enhanced the quality of my project.

When it comes to the technical parts of my project, honestly, every step of this project was a struggle for me. I had never used Unity before, and even with the Unity assignments we did earlier this semester, I still didn’t feel completely comfortable with the program. I was constantly googling problems and looking at tutorials on YouTube. Something as simple as just changing colors of the cubes to colors of the rainbow involved me watching a video to figure it out! I almost forgot about audio with my scene. I was so focused on getting everything to work that it took me a while to realize that I didn’t actually have any sounds for the tornado or the rain. I did my best to try to balance that sound effects with the voiceovers. I know that overall my scene is pretty basic, but it met my goal of creating a project that has an education objective, and I feel like I have grown a lot this semester in my abilities in Unity--considering I started with no experience at all. It was so surreal to put on the Oculus headset and actually go through this world that I created. I can’t believe I did it.

While I struggled with the technical parts of the project, there were also obstacles with trying to design the educational aspects as well. I needed some sort of mechanism to drive the learner through the scene. I decided to go more with fun facts over straight up instruction to make the project entertaining but still imparting some knowledge. Originally I was planning to have a fact at each cube and also a code word at the end of each fact so that when you went through every cube, you would have a bunch code words that at the end,when put together, are another fact.  The problem:  I realized that it might be hard to remember the code words while going through the scene, and since you have the VR headset on, you wouldn’t be able to see to write them down on a piece of paper. This is when I decided to make each cube a color of the rainbow so that there would be a clear way of how to move through the scene based on the color. I also decided to put the tornado at the end so that the user could see it from a distance at the start and then gradually work their way to it where they could actually stand under it. Another choice I made was to start with the facts just being generally about weather, then about rain, and then the last few were specifically about tornadoes. I hope that when taken altogether, that these strategies help the learner to be engaged during the experience.

There are so many more things that I wish I could have done with my scene that were limited by my experience with Unity and the time limit of finishing by the end of the semester. For example, I would have liked the weather to be more interactive. At the end of the day, I wanted all the weather to completely cleared. I think that overall this project just really got me thinking about the potential for creating educational experience in Unity. I am definitely going to look into this more in the future. I am also going to research more about companies out there already that are doing work for education in VR/AR because I think it could be such a powerful tool to help students learn and to engage them more in the classroom.