Udacity VR: 5th Project — VR Education Museum
Project Overview
This is the last project from the “core” track of the Nanodegree. Only the specialization projects will remain before being able to graduate from the program.
Here’s the Android app in case anyone is interested: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.marcelosuzumura.VREducationMuseum
For this 5th project, students were required to research one of the following subjects:
- a VR company
- a VR technology
- an industry that could be impacted by VR
Since I’m very interested in education and particularly to how VR is/will be applied to education, I chose to investigate it further.
To present the findings, students were required to make a VR scene showcasing their research, such as a virtual museum, a science fair or a gallery-like space (instead of simply writing a report).
In my research, I found many interesting projects which attempted to teach students on a broad range of subjects, most of them appealing to young learners still in basic education. Of which, I chose to showcase three of them, in the following subjects:
- History: Apollo 11 VR Experience
- Biology/History/Geography: Dinos do Brasil
- Anatomy/Biology: Anatomyou VR
- And as a bonus, Physics: my own attempt of creating simple experiments in Newtonian mechanics
Museum Featured Projects
Apollo 11 VR Experience
This project invites the user to experience the historic events of men’s landing on the Moon.
It is part documentary, using real audio and video footage from the actual events back in 1969, and part interactive, for instance, allowing viewers/players to explore the lunar surface or fly the command module.
It’s available on Steam for the HTC Vive, Oculus Rift and OSVR.
Dinos do Brasil
Dinos do Brasil is a project showcasing dinosaurs that lived in Brazil, millions of years ago. It is a 30 minutes tour for the Oculus Rift, made in Unreal 4.
It is permanently exposed in Catavento Cultural Museum, in São Paulo, Brazil, which is considered to be the largest interactive museum in Latin America, with an average of 10,000 visitors per day.
What makes dinosaurs great to be depicted in VR is their gigantic scale, which fits perfectly the immersive aspect of VR. You can really feel how small you would be compared to these majestic creatures.
Dinos do Brasil official website
Catavento Cultural Museum official website
Anatomyou VR
Anatomyou VR is a Cardboard app for Android and iOS that let’s users to travel inside the human body. It was designed to enhance the education of health science students, residents and specialists that need to improve their anatomical knowledge, but ultimately can be used by anyone interested in anatomy.
Some features of the app are paid, but you can have a great idea of its potential by evaluating the free parts of the app.
Physics Experiments
I decided to make two experiments, which would only be possible to simulate on a virtual environment:
- an inclined plane with no friction: the classical inclined plane experiment, in which a block slides down an inclined plane, but with the perk that no friction is only possible to achieve in a virtual environment; in the real world, it doesn’t matter how smooth a surface is, there will be always be friction and the block will not slide perfectly.
- conservation of energy experiment: I made a ball that converts potential energy in kinectic energy (back and forth) never losing any energy (in the form of heat), effectively bouncing forever; which again, would not be possible to simulate in the real world, because no material has perfect bounciness and some energy is always lost in the form of heat.
Pictures of the physics experiments can be seen in the end of the next section.
The VR Education Museum
The museum is comprised of five rooms, as described below.
Dystopian classroom: I started the museum visit with the provocative question: will VR make a classroom be a virtual space full of avatars as depicted in the book Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline?
I think not: I bet that VR will enhance education to a whole new level of imersiveness.
Apollo 11 VR Experience exhibit:
Dinos do Brasil exhibit:
Anatomyou VR exhibit:
Physics Experiments exhibit: my simple experiments on Physics
Source code (for Unity 5.5.0f3 and Google Cardboard) can be obtained here and you can be inspired by the code itself (and use parts of it), but please do not redistribute the 3rd party projects screenshots. Please, play fair =)
And again, here’s the Android app if you got curious about seeing the project in action: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.marcelosuzumura.VREducationMuseum
I wish to thank Keila Keiko Matsumura (Dinos do Brasil) and the StereoInMotion Management Team (Anatomyou VR) for their kind words.
If you wish, you can check out my other projects for the VR Nanodegree here:
