MVC EDUCATION 3D : A FRAMEWORK FOR DISTANCE EDUCATION VIRTUAL REALITY APPLICATIONS

Abstract

Recent advancements in the online course delivery for Distance Education(DE) pro- gram is evolving from day-to-day. Though DE programs cost less and also provide exibility to students depending on their pace of learning, delivering lab experiments to them is always a challenging task for the instructors. Few hands-on experiments need students to visit campus in order to perform them. But amateurs who never had training experience, frequent on-campus visits can be more cost-effective. We propose Model-View-Controller-Education-3D (MVC-E3D), a framework to develop virtual reality applications. This framework is similar to MVC architecture, but an additional component - Education (E) module, which has instructional content like lab manual, demo videos, quiz section and User Feedback System(UFS) required for training purposes, are added to the Model (M) component. Besides this, the framework illustrates how to broadcast course contents to students' machines remotely using Photon Unity Networking (PUN) plugin.To show how the proposed framework works, we have implemented a pre-hands-on experiment for ladder safety virtual reality training class, where an instructor hosts a 3D environment based construction lab experiment on a server allowing Distance Education (DE) students to access and finish the training. Hosting a server can reduce computational requirements for student computers. Each system component can be reused for other hands-on experiments. Students can gain experience in lab equipment and familiarize themselves with the preliminary steps before visiting on-campus lab training.