On the Design of Virtual Reality Learning Environments in Engineering

TLDR

Virtual reality is widely used across computer science, engineering, and medicine, with engineering applications accounting for roughly half of all VR resources. The paper aims to evaluate computational software for designing VR applications in engineering education and to provide a practical guide for creating such applications. The authors discuss the capabilities of various computational tools for VR design in engineering education. They propose a general flowchart for designing VR resources that is applicable beyond engineering, demonstrating the method’s broad generalizability.

Abstract

Currently, the use of virtual reality (VR) is being widely applied in different fields, especially in computer science, engineering, and medicine. Concretely, the engineering applications based on VR cover approximately one half of the total number of VR resources (considering the research works published up to last year, 2016). In this paper, the capabilities of different computational software for designing VR applications in engineering education are discussed. As a result, a general flowchart is proposed as a guide for designing VR resources in any application. It is worth highlighting that, rather than this study being based on the applications used in the engineering field, the obtained results can be easily extrapolated to other knowledge areas without any loss of generality. This way, this paper can serve as a guide for creating a VR application.