Andy Tran, Connor Leonie, Patrick Miles, Derek Slater
June 2022
Paper: C. Leonie(*), R. Angotti, and K. Sung, “CourseExpo: An Immersive Collaborative Learning Ecosystem,” in ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology (VRST 2022), Tsukuba, Japan, Nov 2022. Available: Full Paper | Poster.
The physical world can be seen as a constraint on learning. When asked to think of what a classroom looks like, a person may imagine rows of desks and chairs with a teacher on one side of the room with maybe a podium, projector screen, and a whiteboard. Some may even reference online learning and imagine each student sitting at their computer watching a live feed of the teacher’s screen while they deliver their lecture to a grid of still images. CourseXpo is a project we created to reimagine the learning environment by creating a system in a digital space and integrating technologies like Virtual Reality.
The CourseXpo application was built with Unity game engine and uses the Augmented Space Library (ASL) developed by the Cross Reality Collaboration Sandbox (CRCS) Research Group. With these tools, we as a team of four were able to create a modular Expo-style environment where students can wander around, interact with one another, and consume learning material at their own pace.
The result was an app where player controls are smooth and consistent across platforms. Course material can be sent from teacher to student with ASL and the GameLift RealTime Servers it was built on. We’ve constructed our own idea of a classroom as a virtual environment that acts like a learning management system (LMS). By the end of our quarter-long journey, we were able to build a starting foundation towards a new way to learn with plenty of opportunities to expand upon our work.