VRCDEA‐TCS: 3D virtual reality cooperative drawing educational application with textual chatting system
Khalid Ahmad Darabkh, Farah H. Alturk, Saadeh Z. Sweidan · Computer Applications in Engineering Education · 2018
Abstract Virtual reality (VR) products have noticeably improved in terms of quality and price in the last few years which made them more popular than ever. A number of wearable VR glasses are commercially available like Google cardboard. Moreover, leap motion is a small sensor that is connected to a USB port of a personal computer (PC) and allows the user to draw three dimensional (3D) shapes by tracking the movements of hands and fingers. On the other hand, Unity is a game engine which can be used to build 3D Games and VR applications using Java or C# programming languages. In this work, we present a novel 3D Virtual Reality Cooperative Drawing Educational Application with Textual Chatting System (VRCDEA‐TCS), which is a drawing application (app) that allows engineering students to interact together via text messages in addition to the ability to draw 3D models either individually or cooperatively whereas each student is capable of working remotely in a common 3D drawing area with the options of adding or removing parts to the design. Interestingly, the proposed app uses Google cardboard and leap motion sensor to create a VR drawing area and works on both windows PCs and Android smart phones. To this end, the app has shown a reliable and solid performance after being used by a large number of students of the school of engineering at the University of Jordan in which their responses were very positive and encouraging toward the features and characteristics included in our work.