Escape rooms have recently become a popular way to socialize and problem solve in an immersive environment. However, it can be difficult and expensive to create elaborate escape rooms with realistic props. Virtual reality (VR) technology allows developers to create and customize escape rooms more easily. However, to truly make the VR escape room immersive, physical and cooperative interactions are necessary. In this paper, the authors propose and demonstrate a two-player VR escape room developed for the HTC Vive. Physical interactions were made possible by using passive haptics in the form of simple props tracked using HTC Vive trackers and controllers. Additionally, the HTC Vives were networked, and players hands were tracked using the Leap Motion to provide head and hand position cues to teammates.

To inform the design of collaborative learning systems and assignments, our research asks: What aspects of student-generated content truly enhance learning outcomes? Herein we detail the methodologies we have developed to answer this question, including comparing performance on exam questions, some of which are based on specific metaphors found in a student-created "flipped" wiki textbook, and automating wiki content analysis for correlation of performance with creative language forms.