Crystal VR: Creating an Immersive Scientific Tool for Learning and Research

Virtual Reality (VR) offers advantages for learning and research when dealing with concepts or systems that are highly spatial. The ability to gain a new perspective by moving the head or by using the hands to manipulate an object is highly intuitive and allows learners to focus on the subject matter rather than the interface. Even so, many obstacles remain for this potential to be reaped at scale and across disciplines in formal educational and research settings. Here we describe an end-to-end effort to create and implement an immersive tool for learning and research that would overcome these obstacles and prove practically usable and useful in such contexts. The creation process required overcoming myriad design and engineering challenges - these and our corresponding approaches are described in detail.