The Eindhoven Acoustic Virtual Reality (EAVR) toolkit in education and beyond

The Eindhoven Acoustic Virtual Reality (EAVR) toolkit is an open-source software intended to teach undergraduate students in architecture principles in acoustics in an intuitive and interactive way. EAVR allows students to experience and interact with their 3D models in Virtual Reality (VR), by changing the materials of the surfaces and changing the size of the room in real time. Since its conception in 2019, EAVR has been employed in several courses at the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), where students (re)created various spaces, ranging from lecture halls to concert venues. Using students' feedback, an improved version of the toolkit, named EAVR-v2, was created and is presented in this paper. Two spin-off projects of this, a restaurant environment and a concert hall, were presented at the annual Dutch Design Week (DDW) in Eindhoven, which provided general insights in the usability of the toolkit. This paper presents several findings made while using EAVR in education as well as during the DDW. The findings indicate that students enjoy working with EAVR, and highlighted aspects that need improvement.