Early in 2019 I went to do a 6-week placement with the University of South Australia. I was the second placement team to work on this project. The initial team had done some concepting, and my team was expected to iterate and refine the design. The basic premise of the placement was to develop a mobile VR system using Gear VR that allowed the universities teachers and lecturers to better instruct social work students on home visits. The experience was intended to track how students looked over a living space so that tutors could provide clear, useful feedback for the students to action in future sessions.

Ultimately the system is going to be used to help students identify both positive and negative influences on children in the home life. My hope is that this tool can help those students balance the two needs and begin to understand their own biases when they approach these assessments.

The placement currently uses several Samsung Gear VR devices to deliver the experience. Using Mobile VR for this project was new to me, but quickly revealed itself to be a worrying developmental dead end. Over the course of the placement I slowly encouraged a change from the Gear VR to the Oculus Go. While the go is still likely to be rendered obsolete by the Oculus Quest, it still boasts support from Oculus and is quite affordable and accessible. Additionally, the transfer from the Gear to the Go was almost completely painless, being a sub variant of the technology.

Additionally, the environments to be inspected were recorded using 360-degree cameras. This works well with the Gear’s 3 Degrees of Freedom(3DoF) VR experience, as the process for locomotion in such devices can be laborious and often stray into the realms of VR sickness. This gave me some solid experience working in 3DoF and helped with my experiments with VR development later in the year.

Visual tracking of the Inspection Process

The system required a bunch of metrics to be tracked. Working with the 3DoF of the Gear was quite limiting in this aspect. The only thing that players were able to consistently move while still using 360-degree environments was their head. In order to track their inspection process, we literally tracked how their head moved and where they looked. We then timed this process, which allowed tutors to work with their students and elicit feedback on why certain parts of the environment drew their attention more than others. Ideally this will lead to some interesting questions about how the students are approaching these inspections and what their biases are doing to the way they look around the space.