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VR Contents on the Process of Learning to Build a Handmade PC
Shogo TeranishiGraduate School of Kanazawa Institute of Technology
Yoshio YamagishiDepartment of Media InformaticsKanazawa Institute of Technology
Abstract: Recently a virtual reality (VR) has attracted much attention. We produced a VR learning contents which simulates the process to build a handmade PC. The users can experience virtually the process of PC assembly with our system. A head-mount display (HMD), which is necessary for our contents, becomes popular and inexpensive rapidly in these days. In order to move virtual objects with user’s hands, we employ a motion sensor called “Leap Motion”, which can track real-time movement of left-and-right hand and its fingers. We are planning to use the system with our class titled “Major Lab/Exercise II”, in which the PC assembly is mandatory for the students.
Introduction
Recent rapid advancement of the technology enables a virtual reality (VR) to be more spreadable than the other days. In general a VR environment requires the highly immersive devices such as head-mount display (HMD), hence it is possible to provide users superior experiences which are never realized by conventional 2D display. Since such experience will also be valuable in the field of education, there are many examples of the application of VR in education (Psotka, 1995). Here we thought to apply VR to learn the assembly of the PC.
In our department, students are required to build a handmade PC for a course titled “Major Lab/Exercise II.”. This exercise considerably helps to deepen students’ understanding of PC hardware. We have developed some learning contents to support the learning in the course so far. In the following section we briefly review our preliminary works.
Preliminary Works
The issue of the course is the number of PCs for the assembly exercise. Due to space and budgetary constraints, we could not assign one PC to one student but one group. Therefore, after each student has completed the PC assembly, he/she disassembles it for another student to repeat the same procedure. This must be repeated four or five times (depending on the number of persons in the group). As a result, it appeared to be a waste of time. The virtual environment for PC assembly, which can be accessible by many students at the same time, might ease above problem.
In 2008, we developed a ShockWave 3D content to learn the process of PC assembly. In the virtual space of the contents, the learner can move 3D objects of PC components by mouse operation. The assembly process is separated into few stages corresponding to each process of PC assembly. If the virtual PC component object is installed to the proper place, the mission of the stage is completed and the learner can enter the next stage. However, this contents have a serious difficulty in its usability. In the virtual 3D space of the contents which is drawn in the conventional 2D display, the learners often cannot move the PC component as they desired because of the lack of perspective. Therefore we adapted this contents to 3D stereoscopic environments in 2010 (Mukai, et. al, 2011).
Figure.1 shows a screen shot of our 3D stereoscopic contents. This system is coded in Microsoft Visual C# Express 2008 with Microsoft XNA Game Studio 3.1(Microsoft, 2009). We chose nVIDIA 3D VISION system (nVIDIA, 2008) to realize 3D stereoscopy.
Figure 1: 3D Stereoscopic Version of Our Contents
This system improved user’s depth perception but caused another problem. The participants often complained of fatigue during the experiment. Moreover, because the user operation of the system depended on the mouse and the keyboard, the user experience provided by the system was relatively unrealistic compared to the real operation of PC assembly by hands. Therefore we decided to improve the system with VR environment and a motion sensor.
Our System
The key of the improvement of our system is an implementation of VR. VR devices can realize the immersive experience for users in the virtual space. In addition, it is expected that the fatigue specific to the 3D stereoscopic environments will be eased with the VR environments.
The main reason of this kind of fatigue is possibly the “vergence-accommodation conflict” (Shibata, et. al., 2011). When people see real objects or 2D images, the vergence distance equals to the focal distance. However, stereoscopic 3D (S3D) realizes the "virtual" perspective so that they may feel some objects are in front of (or behind) the screen. Therefore their eyes are going to converge on the "virtual" position of the objects, which is different from the focal point on the screen where their eyes must accommodate to. However, there are few people who can watch 3D contents without such fatigue. Yamagishi et. al. (2013) suggested that such people naturally have "3D Readiness" - an ability to adapt 3D stereoscopy. They also proposed a mobile application to foster such “3D Readiness” using a stereogram.
VR also will be the solution of above fatigue problem. The VR devices like HMD usually places magnification lenses in front of the screen since the screen is extremely close to user’s eyes in HMD. Due to the refraction effect of the lenses the virtual focal point becomes far from the real one. Therefore the vergence-accommodation conflict can be smaller than S3D case (Figure 2).
Figure 2: Vergence-Accomodation Conflict
Figure 3 shows the outline of our system. The VR software of our system is built by Unity (Unity, 2016), which is famous 3D game engine and is free to use for personal and non-commercial activities. The Unity 5.1 and later supports VR in default so we constructed virtual space and 3D objects of PC components with Unity 5.4. The HMD, which is the key device for our system, is Oculus-Rift DK2 (Oculus, 2014). The contents built by Unity can be easily adapted to Oculus Rift DK2 because Oculus Corporation provided SDK for Unity.
Figure 3: The Outline of Our System
We adopted the motion sensor “Leap Motion” (Leap Motion, 2014) to operate the virtual PC assembly. “Leap Motion” can track the movement of the joints of the hand and its each finger without any tangible devices. It also tracks right and left hand simultaneously. To distinguish the viewpoint operation and object movement, we assigned two-hand action to viewpoint operation, and the object movement will be done by one-hand (Figure 4).
Figure 4: Hand Operation of Our System
Conclusion
Currently our system is under construction. We are planning to conduct usability and learning effects evaluation after the construction is completed.
References
Leap Motion (2014). Leap motion controller. https://www.leapmotion.com/ Retrieved September 26, 2016.
Microsoft (2009). Microsoft XNA Game Studio 3.1. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=39 Retrieved September 26, 2016.
Mukai, A., Yamagishi, Y., Hirayama, M. J., Tsuruoka, T., & Yamamoto, T. (2011). Effects of stereoscopic 3D contents on the process of learning to build a handmade PC. Knowledge Management & E-Learning: An International Journal (KM&EL), 3(3), 491-506.
nVIDIA (2008). nVIDIA 3D Vision. http://www.nvidia.com/object/3d-vision-main.html Retrieved September 26, 2016.
Oculus VR (2014). Oculus rift dk2. https://www.oculus.com/dk2 Retrieved September 26, 2016.
Psotka, J. (1995). Immersive training systems: Virtual reality and education and training. Instructional science, 23(5-6), pp. 405-431.
Unity (2016). Unity – Game Engine. https://unity3d.com/ Retrieved September 26, 2016.
Yamagishi, Y., Teramatsu, R., & Mizuno, H. (2013). Mobile Application to foster" 3D Readiness" using a Stereogram. In E-Learn: World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, and Higher Education (Vol. 2013, No. 1, pp. 2564-2569).