Development of a second-screen system for sharing virtual reality information

Abstract

Since virtual reality technology can easily realize a particular environment, it has been applied to various training. This technology is also expected in education such as those dealing with three-dimensional figures because they can represent phenomena in three dimensions. One of the standard virtual reality technologies is wearing a head-mounted display to experience a virtual reality project. However, the virtual reality experience is limited to the person wearing the head-mounted display (in most cases) when considering the use of head-mounted display-based virtual reality in education, making its usage unsuitable for mass education. Therefore, in this study, we develop a second-screen system that can share virtual reality information using an Android device. Healthy first- and second-year high school students between the ages of 15 and 17 were asked to use the virtual reality educational materials that implemented the developed system, and a questionnaire survey was conducted. There were no negative comments in the survey on whether proposing second-screen system was necessary, demonstrating the usefulness of the proposed system. Therefore, the second-screen system may adapt VR technology to mass education. In addition, we developed a package to integrate our second-screen system into the pre-existing virtual reality projects. This package simplifies the procedure for implementing a second-screen system, thus helping to reuse the virtual reality projects that have been developed so far.