Hi kids: That´s funny! Mechanics 3D Virtual lab

The Universidade Júnior, Junior University, is a pioneering initiative of University of Porto taking place during July, since 2005. At the Faculty of Engineering of University of Porto different activities are regularly offered in many of its nine departments and oriented for STEM areas also concerned with trying to contribute to foster young students into these areas. The use of emerging technologies is highly accepted by youngsters. So, some of the activities proposed in the context of the Junior University rely on them. Given the great attractiveness created by the use of remote experimentation, virtual reality and augmented reality with haptics interaction, a new application was developed. It is based on the integration of the Oculus Rift Development Kit 2 with a developed set of virtual reality applications. The present work reports results of the use of the Oculus Rift to create the user emersion in a virtual room where different experiments are available and can be “touched” by using 1 DOF haptic. The authors are concerned in evaluating aspects as motivation, adequateness and its immersive capabilities. This work presents a preliminary evaluation study.