Virtual Reality Forge: Pattern-Oriented Authoring of Virtual Reality Nuggets

A current educational trend is to divide learning content in relatively small and independent learning units, referred to as learning nuggets. These "bite-sized" nuggets often rely on patterns in order to reuse these patterns within highly diverse curricular structures like lessons, presentations or demos. In this paper, we explore how virtual reality (VR) can be utilized as a medium for learning purposes similar to learning nuggets. We present a nugget-inspired VR system design and dovetail the pattern-oriented nugget concept in relatively small VR systems. We call this authoring approach with VR nuggets forging. Furthermore, we propose a VR authoring system for these VR nuggets the VR forge. The system design for realizing VR nuggets and the authoring system are presented and implemented in Unity. For an example we utilize a set of basic patterns from the educational domain. In an expert user study, we use the resulting bite-sized VR applications to evaluate four critical aspects concerning VR and nugget-like usage and show that the educational experts accepted the VR nuggets. Within an additional study, we indicate that our authoring system which reflects the simplistic pattern-oriented content creation paradigm of learning nuggets has potential for general laymen authoring of VR application.