Virtual reality (VR) technologies are transforming educational paradigms by enabling highly immersive, interactive simulations that increase engagement and cognition. This paper presents KonnectVR (KVR), an innovative, open-source platform designed to mitigate common barriers in educational VR. Barriers such as high costs, limited content customization, and the absence of real-time assessments. The system, constructed by undergraduate students, facilitates experiential learning, real-time collaboration, and assessment delivery, empowering educators with an unprecedented degree of accessibility and customization. Employing a case study methodology, we provide unique insider perspectives into KVR's architectural design, underlying pedagogical framework, development processes, challenges encountered, and future directions. Findings reveal technical hurdles overcome by undergraduate student teams like VR-specific programming, user interface design, networking, and cybersecurity integration. The analysis uncovers key themes around project-based skill acquisition, problem-solving perseverance, cross-team knowledge gaps, and the benefits of an agile, user-centric approach. Ultimately, KVR demonstrates how emerging technologies and open-sourced solutions can converge to innovate learning, pushing boundaries while serving an egalitarian educational mission. The platform sets the foundation for a new generation of community-driven tools democratizing access to interactive, distributive, collaborative VR experiences that maximize knowledge construction.
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Real-time Construction Inspection in an Immersive Environment with an Inspector Assistant Robot
Construction project management requires frequent inspections to ensure the quality and progress of the construction work. Multiple stakeholders are involved in the inspection process during the project lifecycle. Some project stakeholders, such as architects, owners, structural engineers are involved with multiple construction projects at a time and are responsible to conduct timely inspection and monitoring tasks. This paper studies the potential of Virtual Reality (VR) and robotics for real-time remote inspection. The benefits and challenges of using VR for construction inspection and monitoring were identified and ranked through a systematic literature review. The top 5 benefits were found to be enhanced collaboration, realistic and immersive visualization, remote presence, reduction in inspection time, and support for decision-making. The top 5 challenges identified in this study include low- resolution displays, limited integration with existing technologies (such as BIM), causing disorientation and dizziness for the user, cost of adoption, and job site internet access limitations. Finally, a new approach was investigated for using VR to enable an immersive experience in remote inspection with an inspector assistant robot for real-time remote construction inspection. The experimental investigation verified the identified benefits and challenges.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2128948
- PAR ID:
- 10351480
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- EPiC Series in Built Environment
- Volume:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 2632-881X
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 389 to 379
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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