Lowering the Entry Barrier for Students Programming Virtual Reality Applications

Abstract

In Computer Graphics, it is common practice to accompany lectures with hands-on tutorials and/or project assignments that allow students to write and run their own interactive graphics applications. In the special case of Virtual Reality courses, this approach is difficult to maintain since the software requirements pose a high entry barrier to students. In this paper, we propose a technique to significantly simplify Virtual Reality application programming, and implement it in an easy-to-use framework that supports the full range of typical Virtual Reality hardware setups, from head-mounted displays to multi-node, multi-GPU render clusters. The framework lowers the entry barrier for students and allows them to focus on course goals instead of fighting software complexities.