Virtual Hydrogen, a VR hydrogen atomic orbitals viewer in physics and chemistry
Hiroya Suno, Nobuaki Ohno · Procedia Computer Science · 2024
With the goal of exploring possibilities of virtual reality (VR) as education tools, we have been developing the VR application called “Virtual Hydrogen” allowing for visualizing, in 3D space, the quantum atomic orbitals or wave functions of the hydrogen atom, which is one of the most important subjects taught in undergraduate physics and chemistry classes. Our goal is to enable students to experience attractive and enjoyable scenarios which make it more amenable to master the concepts of quantum mechanics or quantum chemistry. Along this line, we were recently able to implement successfully the standalone version of the Virtual Hydrogen application on the Meta Quest head-mounted displays (HMDs). In this paper, we report the on-going and future developments and improvements of the application.