BuckeyeVR 3D Plot Viewer – A Free Resource for Smartphone-based VR

Although there are a number of smartphone apps that can produce interesting stereoscopic visualizations using a cheap VR viewer (often called Google Cardboard), until recently there did not exist a resource to allow STEM educators to use this VR technology to display user-defined functions, curves and vector fields. The BuckeyeVR 3D plot viewer is a free resource that allows educators to both render a user-defined function in a web interface and to quickly view this function in stereoscopic 3D using smartphone-based VR. This is made possible by a freely available smartphone app for Android and iPhones that can take information from the web interface and reproduce the visualization on the smartphone. This resource is available at buckeyevr.osu.edu and we encourage STEM educators to adopt it and to collaborate with Ohio State in examining the pedagogical benefits of this technology.