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Virtual Reality Content for Aviation Education

In collegiate aviation education, we often find that classroom based learning can provide several advantages over aircraft based learning. Let’s face it, a classroom that’s three feet wide, travelling at 120 miles per hour, putting out 92 dBA, while shaking, and inevitably being either too hot or too cold is not a great environment to learn about regulations, aerodynamic theories, or any of the myriad of other high level learning tasks required to be a good pilot.

Because of this, a student’s first semester in “flight” training involves just about everything but actually flying. Instead these students, many of whom have never been truly up close to an airplane, find themselves in an on campus classroom miles away from a real-life airplane. While the classroom is beneficial, it leads to new challenges that become particularly acute when attempting to describe mechanical aspects of the plane.

To help with this, the Center for Aviation Studies is beginning to invest in VR technology to develop and deliver materials that will help to address this issue. I have been tasked with piloting this program through the initial proof of concept phase and the following pages will detail our initial efforts.