Teaching Social Virtual Reality With Ubiq

Abstract

We share our experiences of teaching virtual reality with Ubiq, an open-source system for building social virtual reality (VR). VR as a subject touches on many areas, including perception, human-computer interaction, and psychology. In our VE module, we consider all aspects of VR. In recent years, networked VR, and in particular social VR, has become increasingly relevant, at the same time as demand for online and hybrid teaching has increased. Commercial social virtual reality systems have proliferated, but for a number of reasons, this has not resulted in systems any more suitable for research and teaching. As a result we created Ubiq, a system for building social VR applications designed first for research and teaching. In this article, we describe how Ubiq came to be, and our experiences of using it in our virtual environments module over the last two years.