Our journey with virtual reality (VR) in university teaching began with the MyScore platform that would enable meaningful collaboration in higher education and facilitate and support VR-based teaching and learning concepts. Over the years of development and application, our open source VR software MyScore, which was originally financed for the DAAD with funds from the BMBF, grew considerably. It was given a variety of application scenarios and now supports a wide range of end devices. However, this growth also brought challenges, particularly in terms of maintaining platform compatibility and providing a consistent user experience across all devices. At the same time, MyScore was not ideal for collaboration in terms of open source development, as it was difficult for external parties to actively participate in code development.

With our new open source VR platform, which is available under the name Anywhere Academy , we want to tackle new challenges and introduce a more flexible and accessible solution. Our core requirements for Anywhere Academy include:

Web-based access: A web-based version of Anywhere Academy will ensure seamless access across multiple devices and remove existing barriers to entry.

Broad platform support: We intend to support all popular standalone and tethered VR headsets as well as desktop and mobile devices to cater to a wide range of users and preferences.

Simple collaborative development: Anywhere Academy will be designed from the ground up to be open for collaboration, with clear documentation and well-defined interfaces. This will allow a wider community of developers and teachers to contribute to the growth and development of the platform.

Our previous approach with MyScore, a monolithic software, unfortunately led to limitations in flexibility and customizability over time. Potential users were often interested in specific scenarios or features rather than the full range of platform functionality. To solve this problem, Anywhere Academy will take a modular approach that separates the core VR functionalities from the actual content.

This separation will allow us to create a lightweight and flexible framework that AnyVR Frameworkwhich will form the basis of the Anywhere Academy and which will be made publicly available as open source on GitHub. We will license it with the Gnu General Public License (3 or newer) to ensure that any developments that come out of it will remain open and free forever. The AnyVR framework will provide essential features such as user interactions, multi-user collaboration and communication. It will also include the code for the necessary dedicated servers that can be hosted on any Linux server.

In this way, the AnyVR framework makes it easy to implement a multi-user VR application so that users can concentrate on developing VR scenarios. This modular architecture will allow us to tailor content more individually to specific areas and interests and thus appeal to a wider range of users.

With this framework and the goal of expanding the potential of virtual reality for university teaching, we will implement Anywhere Academy based on AnyVR in the coming period. We will extend the AnyVR framework with a customized avatar system and several AI assistance tools to enable personalized, fluid and immersive interactions within the VR environment.

To achieve our goals for the Anywhere Academy, we are building a new future-proof software architecture, utilizing well-designed software interfaces and innovative automation techniques. We are confident that with these principles we can create a versatile and accessible VR platform that will make a valuable contribution to further increasing the quality of VR-based teaching.

Let the AnyVR Framework and the Anywhere Academy platform surprise you!