Applications of VR in Education - enhancing Physics Simulations

Your Name: Rishi Upadhyay

Grade Level: 11

School or Organization Name: Monta Vista High School

Co-Presenter Name(s):

Area of the World from Which You Will Present: California, US

Language in Which You Will Present: English

Target Audience(s): VR enthusiasts, STEM enthusiasts, Teachers, Professors, All people interested in VR and education.

Short Session Description (one line):

Discussion of the rise of virtual reality and its application in the field of education.

Full Session Description (as long as you would like):

Virtual reality has experienced incredible growth in the last few years and is poised to expand even further as the technology required becomes more and more available. One of the key applications of Virtual Reality is education. The ability to see, hear, and feel things is unrivaled in terms of the education value; and virtual reality can help bridge the gap between the hands on activities and the classroom. VR apps can be particularly useful in situations where it is hard to reproduce a real life experience other ways - allowing medical students to view a cadaver in 3D and learn more about the human body for example. Another key application and the focus of my interest is is Physics. Often physics simulations require expensive or inaccessible materials that make having a real simulation difficult. VR is perfectly suited to make physics simulations more accessible and easy to use.
There are many resources that show physics simulations online including phet.colorado.edu, ck12.org etc.; but these simulations lack the feeling of realness and ability to manipulate parameters and see the impact. In order to address these limitations, I am working to port these simulations over to the 3D VR platform. To make the simulations interactive, I decided to use the doppler effect to track hand motions based on research done by Microsoft.
In this presentation I will go over the overall technology and the applications of VR, the work I have done in applying VR to physics simulations, some of the challenges I ran into, and the future directions in this field.

Websites / URLs Associated with Your Session:

Tags: 2017STEMProjects, Education, Physics, Reality, Virtual