This is our demonstration of experiential learning for Nottingham Trent University colleagues at the Annual Learning and Teaching Conference. We made significant design choices for this experience to make it as accessible as possible, especially for those who had never tried VR before.
1. For some first-time users of virtual reality, the experience of putting on a VR headset and suddenly being disconnected from reality can be unsettling. To counter this, we wanted them to start in mixed reality and transition into virtual reality. When users first put on the headset, nothing changes for them. They are in the same space, but there is a virtual elevator that they can enter if they wish. This provides a natural-feeling transition into virtual reality as they are already comfortable wearing the headset.
2. One of the most disorienting effects in virtual reality is movement. Traditionally, a controller is used to move around a virtual space, meaning that the user could travel an infinite distance without physically moving their body. For new users of VR, this often results in motion sickness quite quickly. By using room-scale boundaries, users needed to physically move around the space, creating a more natural feeling of movement. The space was mapped to roughly 3 x 6 meters in the real world, requiring that much space for each user.
3. We chose not to use controllers for interactions and implemented hand tracking. Allowing first-time users to push virtual buttons with their fingers and pick up objects with their hands without having to remember which buttons to hold on a controller made interactions more natural.
The demo was created in Unity, and we used a combination of Meta Quest 3 and Meta Quest Pro headsets throughout the day.
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