Elisandro Cabada
Assistant Professor, Medical and Bioengineering Librarian, Interim Head, Mathematics Library
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
William Mischo
Berthold Family Professor Emeritus in Information Access and Discovery, Head, Grainger Engineering Library Information Center
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The application of Virtual Reality (VR) technologies in teaching and learning in higher education has experienced a significant uptake in the last few years as the underlying technologies have become more scalable and affordable. However, many barriers continue to create bottlenecks that limit a broader adoption of VR for instruction. These barriers include a lack of available and adequate software for use in education, issues of cost for purchasing or developing custom VR apps, restrictive licenses for third party software that limit the ability to scale VR experiences to support a course or academic department, distribution challenges associated with accessing third party software from existing commercial platforms, concerns with user data privacy, and a lack of functionality for assessing the efficacy of the VR application for teaching and learning. To that end, the Grainger Engineering Library Information Center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign developed the Komodo platform, a browser-based tool built to allow instructors from all technical literacies to create domain (subject) modules specific to their teaching and learning content. This application allows multiple users within the same virtual environment to interact with an instructor and lesson-specific 3D content. Komodo is compatible with nearly all current 6 Degrees of Freedom (6DOF) VR headsets as well as allows users to interact with their peers from any networked device with a compatible browser, without the need for a VR headset. Komodo is open source and free, can be accessed from an easy to use web portal, includes accessibility features such as speech-to-text, and has built-in tools for evaluating and assessing how users interacted with a virtual environment.
Komodo website: https://komodo-dev.library.illinois.edu/about
Story about Komodo being used for a Fashion Design course: https://vr.web.illinois.edu/2020/11/09/fashion-critique-in-komodo/
Social media post about Komodo being used for a Materials Science and Engineering course: https://twitter.com/aschleife/status/1317929177694306305?s=20