VRExplorer an immersive and collaborative tool to multiply field trip experiences

VRExplorerThis software is an immersive and collaborative tool allowing visualization and analysis of planetary terrains. This tool has been developed for education of the new generation of geoscientists to improve the comprehension of planetary terrains. After several months of deployment, VRExplorer already shows a huge potential both for students and researchers. The software is based on a cloud platform on which users can upload their dataset, using standard formats used by the geoscience community: digital terrain models, meshes, and point clouds. It creates the virtual scenes automatically and share the tiles to remote users in real time up to the native resolution of the dataset. Connecting to the application, users can see and talk to each other, they can navigate over the terrains stored on the server using both virtual reality headsets and classical computers.A cloud-based storageThe web-platform allows users to upload GeoTIFs satellite images to create regional context of areas of interest. It reads the metadata of images providing an absolute geographic reference for each virtual scene based on the projection information of inputs. Virtual terrains are then processed using both topographical (DTM) and texture (orthoimages). Users can also upload meshes in 3DTiles format (Standard from Open Geospatial consortium). This specific file format enables to store and share massive meshes preserving the initial resolution of the data and the geographic reference.The result is a fusion of massive datasets shared to multiple users.A tool for teaching geosciencesVRExplorer is already used in several universities and aims at becoming a reference for virtual pedagogy on unreachable terrains.For teachers, this tool is used to:- Easily share and explore geodata-rich scenes of various kind,- Create courses and assessments into the virtual scene,- Gather records of user experiences, measurements created by users, and answers to course sessions for post course analysis.For students, it’s a ludo-educative tool providing emotional experiences which are well-known to be a multiplier in the process of understanding and memorization.