SBIR Phase I: An Easy-to-use Virtual Reality Development Toolkit for Education

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The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to develop an easy-to-use virtual reality (VR) toolkit to enable rapid development and deployment of educational VR experiences. The COVID-19 pandemic made it clear that technology to enable remote learning is critical to education at all levels. However, instructors often do not use these technologies because they lack understanding of how to meaningfully deploy it in their courses. In order for VR to be useful in education, it must not just be easy for learners to use, but also must be easy for instructors to learn to use it. This project will create a user-friendly toolkit with which educators can create targeted, subject-specific, VR educational experiences. This learning tool may become an important part of future education as it will provide access for a diverse group of students of all ages and education levels who may be unable to be physically present (due to illness, location, or other social or socio-economic obstacles) to complete courses and curricula where on-site attendance is not possible.This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project fills an industry gap and unaddressed demand for educational simulations. Studies of students and instructors have shown that both want VR experiences as part of a broader demand for consumable instructional content. Developing this content, however, presents two interconnected technical hurdles: (1) developing pipelines by which existing digital resources can be used to create VR assets, and (2) creating a holistic user experience for non-technical users in the non-standardized computing environment of K-12 and higher education. Current state-of-the-art VR systems are often too complicated for non-technical users, requiring the user to have extensive programming skills, which many educators do not. This project seeks to develop methods to easily create VR assets from non-VR digital resources and a user experience (UX) structured around the “backward design” approach to instructional design. By building on the latest functionality for gestural interfaces to reflect interactions with physical spaces and objects, and developing templates to guide the instructional designer through the process, this project will enable instructional designers to develop realistic, compelling, and educationally valuable VR learning experiences.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.