New effective aid for teaching technology subjects: 3D spherical panoramas joined with virtual reality

Abstract

Rapid development of modern technology and its increasing complexity make high demands to the quality of training of its users. Among others, an important class is vehicles, both civil and military. In the teaching of associated subjects, the accepted hierarchy of teaching aids includes common visual aids (posters, videos, scale models etc.) on the first stage, followed by simulators ranging in complexity, and finished at real vehicles. It allows achieving some balance between cost and efficiency by partial replacement of more expensive and elaborated aids with the less expensive ones. However, the analysis of teaching experience in the Military Institute of Armored Forces of National Technical University “Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute” (Institute) reveals that the balance is still suboptimal, and the present teaching aids are still not enough to allow efficient teaching. This fact raises the problem of extending the range of available teaching aids for vehicle-related subjects, which is the aim of the work. Benefiting from the modern information and visualization technologies, we present a new teaching aid that constitutes a spherical (360° or 3D) photographic panorama and a Virtual Reality (VR) device. The nature of the aid, its potential applications, limitations and benefits in comparison to the common aids are discussed. The proposed aid is shown to be cost-effective and is proved to increase efficiency of training, according to the results of a teaching experiment that was carried out in the Institute. For the implementation, a tight collaboration between the Institute and an IT company “Innovative Distance Learning Systems Limited” was established. A series of panoramas, which are already available, and its planned expansions are presented. The authors conclude that the proposed aid may significantly improve the cost-efficiency balance of teaching a range of technology subjects.