Learn a language by traveling with VerseVR!
Learning a foreign language has become a common part of school curriculums. Students memorize vocabulary for quizzes and recite sentences for pronunciation. We too had once resigned myself to the fate of endlessly copying as the only way to make sure that vocabulary and grammar stuck in my head.
But then, we got to experience studying abroad!
I traveled to Beijing, China for three months, for Dartmouth’s Chinese LSA+. Completely immersed in a foreign language, I found myself with no choice but to step up and learn from every moment, every interaction. I learned the names of local dishes from reading the menu in the dining hall while waiting in line to order. I learned directions, distances and times by checking the schedule for the next bus to the tourist spots. I learned the names of household goods when I had to run to the student supermarket on campus. Not only did my environment force me to learn, it also pushed me to learn the most relevant, useful parts of the language first. While I might have read essays about social issues or history in class, the experience of traveling and living in a different country changed my learning — and I could have never achieved my same level of competency.
Now, with the pandemic still looming over the travel industry, many students of language find themselves stuck at home, deprived of this great opportunity to learn language in an immersive environment. With no one to talk to and nowhere to go, how can someone get a hands-on language-learning experience combined with all the fun of exploring an unfamiliar setting?
INTRODUCING VERSEVR
That’s why our team created VerseVR, a virtual reality game where you can travel to foreign countries and immerse yourself in quests designed to teach you practical language skills. Our team strongly believes that the best way to learn language is through immersion, but we also believe that language learners should be able to work at their own pace while feeling challenged but not overwhelmed. That’s why VerseVR’s scaling difficulty has 5 different levels, from 100% English, to 100% the foreign language of your choice. Our players can have a simple travel experience without the stress of not knowing the language, or they can test their fluency by tackling conversations with in-game locals.
In our first version presented at Technigala, VerseVR has one target language and location: learning Portuguese in the beach town of Aparecida do Sul in Brazil. From our main menu, you can select the Brazil destination and then travel to one of two quests.
WELCOME TO APARECIDA!
The first quest takes you to a gift shop where you are aiming to buy a gift for your friend. Things happen and you end up having to help out at the store and pick out some gifts for the other customers too! This quest showcases our conversation system and how the dialogue scales to your preferred difficulty level, while also providing tools to help you if you’re stuck. If you need the character to repeat themselves, just ask — and if you still can’t understand them, let them know, and the difficulty level will decrease slightly, adding back more familiar phrases into the conversation so you can try again.
Selecting an item as a gift is simple too — just hold your hand over it for a few seconds and a red arrow will appear indicating that it’s been selected.
The second quest takes you to the real attraction of Aparecida do Sul, the beach! We wanted to create a more open space for players to explore, and we invite them to dig around on the beach looking for shells (or crabs). Here we wanted to emphasize the immersive feeling of traveling to a different place that only VR can create.
OUR PROCESS AND VISION
We developed our game for Oculus VR using the Unity game engine. Unity has a lot of helpful built-in functionality for developing for VR, and we used the Unity XR package to ensure that, while we used Oculus headsets for our testing, VerseVR is functional on any VR headset that supports Unity XR. We also utilized a variety of other resources from the Unity Asset Store, such as the Ambient Sounds package to add to the immersive quality of our in-game world, and various character and item models.
We believe that VR provides a unique and underexplored language learning experience, and we hope that VerseVR serves as an initial demonstration of the advantages of VR as a learning experience. A study conducted by our team compared the efficacy of VerseVR as a language learning tool compared to a control method of reading a short passage accompanied with vocabulary. While participants in both groups did well on the quiz at the end, those in the control group mentioned that in their opinion the best way to improve such an experience was through an “interactive roleplay or read-along” of the written passage. We see this as a sign that VR could be a way to supplement language learning by providing that space of roleplaying key interactions in the absence of an immersive environment where people can have those interactions naturally.
HOW TO PLAY VERSEVR
To play the game, all you need is an Oculus headset, controllers, and plenty of space to move around! Make sure you’re in a quiet environment so you can hear the audio from the game.
You’ll be placed in the tutorial scene where you’ll be introduced to the game’s mechanics including teleporting, turning, selecting dialogue options, and object interaction. When you’re ready to venture on to a quest, select the appropriate one on the dial like so!
WHO ARE WE?
We are five seniors at Dartmouth College, class of 2022 majoring in Computer Science. This is the first picture we took together starting on this project. From left to right, our names are: Gui Marinho, Thomas Lingard, Eunice Kweon, Antony Guzman, Katie Huang.
