School of Science and Technology 科技學院
Computing Programmes 電腦學系
| Programme | Bachelor of Computing with Honours in Internet Technology |
| Supervisor | Dr. Vanessa Ng |
| Areas | Virtual Reality Applications |
| Year of Completion | 2017 |
| Paper Published | Lot-Hymn Cheung, Wing-Hong Lam, Sze-Wai Wong, S. C. Ng, and Andrew Lui, “VISUAL SPACE: A Virtual Reality Application for Visual Art Education”, Proc. of International Conference on Open and Innovative Education (ICOIE 2017), Hong Kong, 12-14 July 2017, pp. 30-41. |
The aim of the project is to develop a VR application to enhance Hong Kong secondary school students' interest of western artwork appreciation. The application focuses on helping users to deepen their impressions and memories of western artworks.
The application will be divided into three parts: Artwork Tutorial, Art Gallery and Gameplay. The artwork tutorial is an interactive experience between artworks and users. The visual elements of the artwork will become dynamic and response with user actions to attract users' attention. The virtual gallery is a free space for users to explore around and discover the artworks. It provides a well-designed environment for artwork appreciation and the details of each artwork will also be provided. For selected artworks, there will be some related games for users to play in order to discover more. Users will have a deeper understanding of western artworks with the VR experience.
In order to achieve the aim, the project has defined the following objectives:
We selected VR as our main technology to present the context of western artworks to users. All the concepts, elements and styles of western artworks will be expressed to users with our VR experience. Moreover, unity3D will be used as development tool for the implementation. The VR application will be three sections: Tutorial, Gallery, and Game. Upon the solution, Hong Kong students would have an in-deep comprehension with western artworks.
According to the user interface of Menu, users use the VR technology for the interaction in choosing the door to enter Gallery or Tutorial.
Figure 1: The User Interface of the Menu
Figure 2: The User Interface of the Tutorial
From the evaluation of the prototype, we conclude that our work can increase Hong Kong students' interest of western artwork appreciation by using Virtual Reality technology, using head movement travel gallery to appreciate the famous paintings in virtual art gallery gives them a different experiences of learning visual art, tutorial room and games able to help users to deepen their impressions and memories of western artworks.
The limitations of our solution are, if the application decided to use in school, the school needs to equip a VR headset for students to use, and school needs to provide a compatible electronic device for VR application on each VR headset. After user put on the VR headset, only he or she can view on the screen. If they encounter problems from the application, they need to describe the contents what they seen or put down the VR headset to look for help. Although this issue can be solved by projecting the device screen on the computer monitor, it needs more equipment to support. Owing to the cost of using VR is high, it may affect the popularity of using our application.
VR technology is changing the way of traditional education, since this technology is still an innovation technology at present, it believes that whether students or teachers are not familiar with this technology, so more practices of using VR is needed, such as how to insert the supported electronic device into the headset, how to adjust the focus, etc.
It may affect user health if using VR for a long time, it probably damages eyes, easily to have dizziness and motion sickness.
For future works, we are going to support the VR remote controller in iOS version because the control stick is not supported in iOS, only the function keys of a VR remote controller are supported in iOS now. Nevertheless, they can use virtual controller for walkthrough our application, and interact with it in those rooms. For the user interface, we will improve hover state for all the buttons which can let user more easily to see what he/she is selected. Also, we will improve the performance of game 1, that is “The Persistence of Memory”, because it compared to the other two games, the running speed of game 1 is relatively slow.
