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.