Mobile tracked displays as engaging and effective learning platforms

We present the design of a novel educational virtual reality application to aid undergraduate engineering students in understanding the basic principles of fluid mechanics. The application was deployed on a tablet computer, and we compared two 3D userinterfaces, which differed primarily by locomotion technique. The first technique employed multi-touch gestures. The second technique used a mobile-tracked display. We conducted a pilot study with 23 participants, divided into two groups according to user-interface type. We restricted participants to undergraduate engineering students in an engineering statics course that were familiar with free-body diagrams of distributed loads but had not been taught the principles of fluid mechanics. Participants answered applied visual reasoning questions and theoretical questions, while they interacted with the application. Our results indicate that a mobile-tracked display is a usable, engaging approach, but results were unclear with respect to learning.