Educational Objective: Explore the possibilities for using virtual reality to aid academic work through a controlled environment.
Project Description: With the support of the Amherst College IT department, Professor Dole has been developing an application for reading and annotating PDF documents in VR. The application is called Virtual Reality Reading Room. It creates an immersive environment for distraction-free reading and annotating of texts in electronic form (for example, scanned books or essays), which is intended to provide a better experience for such work than flat-screen devices currently provide.
Academic Technology Tools: Windows Mixed Reality platform, a Samsung Odyssey+, HP Reverb
A short article and video describing the work can be found here. This video was produced in 2017, when the application ran only on the Oculus Rift.
Here is a demonstration video of a more recent version of the application (created by Andrew Dole in May 2019):
