Problem Statement
Lecturing is the most common form of teaching in education but its effectiveness to help students learn and grasp material is questionable. Research suggests that approximately “60% of students find at least half their lectures boring - with about 30% claiming to find most or all of their lectures boring.” In order to combat the negative effects of lecture-style teaching methods, virtual reality (VR) technology can be utilized to enhance the learning experience of students and engage them to learn more material. CPUniverse is a VR-based learning application that simulates the journey of what happens when a computer mouse is clicked. The simulation explains how different parts of the computer interact with one another and takes the user through each of the intermediate steps, providing a perspective that cannot be emulated in real life.
Technology
- Blender
- Unity
- XCode
- Google Cardboard
Scenes Included
Scene One
The second scene contains the inside of the mouse, in which all of the parts of an optical mouse are present in order to portray what the mouse does when either the right or left side button is clicked.
Scene Two
In scene three, the mouse click exploration goes a step further by having the mouse click information move to the motherboard through the BIOS and CPU.
Scene Three
In the final scene, the mouse click is fully processed by the CPU with help from the memory subsystem and the mouse click action can be executed.
Contributors
Alana Zakroczemski
Alana is a senior at the University of Rochester studying computer science and studio art. She worked on creating the 3D environments in Blender, and in configuring Unity with the Google Carboard SDK.
Sooyoung Kim
Sooyoung is a senior at the University of Rochester studying computer science and economics. He primarily concentrated on researching how to import Blender animations into Unity and how to build the Unity Project as an iOS application and deploy it onto an iPhone.