Teaching Virtual Reality in Virtual Reality

 The project Teaching VR in VR designs, implements and evaluates an immersive module for teaching, learning and testing VR materials for the Master's degree programme Virtual Reality at the Department of Computer Science at Bauhaus University Weimar. Teachers demonstrate VR content to students in interactive live lectures. Students are able to actively participate in these lectures by trying out VR techniques individually or together. Teaching and learning materials are made available in a persistent social virtual world as interactive VR recordings that can be accessed at any time and from any location. Teaching VR in VR is designed to enhance the experience of the content taught and to increase awareness and understanding of usability issues and limitations.

For this purpose, the multi-user framework vrEDUsys was developed. In addition to being able to manage live lectures with up to 20 students, it provides students with the ability to create their own personalised, application-independent avatar to increase user embodiment and engagement. The framework is designed to support standalone HMDs such as the Oculus Quest 2, projection-based multi-user systems and desktop-based systems for participation in joint virtual sessions. To support students who were unable to attend live lectures, a recording tool was developed to allow VR sessions to be recorded and recorded sessions to be played back synchronously by groups of students. To increase engagement and exploration, a gamification system was developed to allow students to actively participate in challenges around VR interaction techniques.