Mostafa Helaly | VR/AR Educational Labs: A mixed reality learning platform

 
During the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a strong obligation to develop new ways to teach students online and in an engaging manner. The development of VR/AR Educational Labs was driven not only by the need to evolve the current educational system to adapt to current world events, but also as a step to move the current education system forward towards a more visual and interactive system, especially in STEM subjects.

VR and AR have proven to be incredibly interactive technologies that capitalize on their ability to visualize objects and environments. Researching students’ performances based on the different learning methods available to them shows that students with access to more visual methods of learning outperformed those who only had access to only text-based learning material. This made the two technologies perfect for developing an interactive educational app.

A key issue associated with STEM subjects such as physics and chemistry is that they require both theoretical knowledge, as well as practical exercises in order to fully grasp the subject. However, in many cases students do not experience any experiments due to the costs related to running the experiments; cost of materials and cost of building and maintaining a lab being the main two. VR/AR Educational Labs was developed using Google’s Cardboard VR SDK and Vuforia’s Image Targeting model and built in Unity to significantly reduce the cost of performing lab experiments.

VR/AR Educational Labs sets itself apart from other VR and AR educational applications with its unique integration of both VR and AR in a single application. Many of the available applications fail to link the two technologies in a meaningful way that offers a streamlined user experience. Additionally, VR/AR Educational Labs can be easily integrated into a school’s current curriculum, making it a versatile tool for schools to use.