Choosing an Appropriate VR Platform: Planning for the Future
As an exercise in choosing an appropriate VR platform for a target audience, I chose to explore the requirements of an application to teach animation fundamentals. The initial questions used to choose a platform can be found in my previous Medium post. In this post, I explore how any of those choices may change based on any upcoming technology in the next two years or so.
Questions
How would Augmented Reality better help teach your experience?
For my initial plan for an app for teaching animation principles, Virtual Reality made more sense than AR. I could imagine a use case where students could possibly draw keyframes or animation curves on paper and an AR could process them to show the affect they would have on an animation, but I also think this type of interaction could be done with an interface in VR. For animation lessons, there is also something nice about being fully transported out of the real world environment so students don’t limit their animations to the real world laws of physics.
How could eye tracking help you better tailor your experience to your students?
I couldn’t think of a very good use case for eye tracking for an animation lesson application. With eye tracking, I may be able to better reduce motion sickness and make the experience more comfortable for most students.
How would better Haptics better teach your experience?
For an animation principles app, I don’t think haptics would improve the experience. Haptics could be added to any student interactions or posible physic simulations, but it would not be vital to the understanding of the lessons.
How important is graphical fidelity to your experience? (Yes this is the same as last time, but important to consider as students could potentially get better technology)
Graphical fidelity is not very important to the app. The concepts can be conveyed through simple geometry. Future lessons in similuation or particle effects may benefit from more powerful hardware, but this would not be reason to delay the development of the application.
How critical is it that your target student receives this training within the next two years?
It is not critical that the target students receive this training within two year since the material doesn’t really change much. However, given the simple technical requirements for the application to effective, there is no reason to hold off its development for future technological advancements.
