2.177: DESIGNING VIRTUAL WORLDS

Aware is a virtual reality (VR) experience that aims to help people who struggle with big emotions improve their coping skills and interoception. Individuals will use biometric-tracking hardware that controls visual stimuli in the VR environment corresponding to emotion-associated symptoms in the body. Users will engage in a de-escalation environment that includes a calming scene and accessibility preferences and will be guided through preferred coping strategies (for eg. box breathing). Our vision is for this VR experience to serve as a guide to emotional regulation and a documentation tool that tracks the success of coping techniques for a person.

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La Quinta del Sordo is an immersive VR experience that brings visitors into Francisco de Goya’s home, where his final haunting masterpieces, the Black Paintings, were hidden. Visitors can explore the recreated 'house of the deaf', revealing Goya's inner turmoil through these eerie works in place as the artist himself experienced them. As you wander the corridors alongside Goya's spirit, you're faced with a choice: honor the artist's secretive intent or unveil the art to the world. This journey offers a unique insight into the darkness that shaped Goya's genius and challenges your understanding of his art and his legacy.

This educational module in our overall Aeroverse project aims to teach undergraduate students about spacecraft systems engineering, a fundamental concept in aerospace engineering. In our simulation, students will be introduced to Mars and the Curiosity mission. Students will discover the parts of the rover and understand the systems engineering process behind the rover’s design. Students will have the ability to operate the rover on Mars, mimicking operations in real life, and later features will allow the student to control the robotic sampling drill to collect rock samples.

The Mars simulation will be presented in the upcoming January IAP Aeroverse class during our “robotic space week.” In the overall Aeroverse class, students will be introduced to principles and applications of aerospace engineering through a series of challenges involving air and space. Other modules will have features such as analyzing and flying a jet plane, exploring the surface of Mars using remote controlled and autonomous vehicles, and conducting operations in the International Space Station (ISS). Through these challenges, students will learn fundamental concepts in aerospace engineering such as aerodynamics, systems engineering, and flight dynamics. This first iteration of the subject will include only VR applications, using the Meta Quest 2 headset. The Aeroverse course hopes to collect data regarding the impact of VR as a teaching medium and to quantify the effect it has on students’ learning outcomes.

Virtual Vitality is a VR-gamified physical therapy tool that helps stroke patients regain their finger movement abilities. The game uses Meta Quest’s built-in hand motion capture to show users’ hands in different VR environments, where physiotherapy is turned into a music game in which users pinch their fingers in response to objects popping up on their individual fingers and creating a melody.

In our team, there is a member coping with ACL injuries, and two of us are managing scoliosis. Motivated by the challenges we faced during our own physical therapy journeys, we came together to create Virtual Vitality. Drawing from our personal experiences, our objective is to enhance the physical therapy journey for individuals, ensuring a more positive and effective long-term experience for a broader audience.

Our team has identified 2 main limitations in conventional physiotherapy practices:

1. Monotonous and repetitive approaches
2. Progress takes time, and the long-term commitment often makes patients feel defeated or lack motivation over time

Reflecting on those observations, we decided that this would be an excellent concept to implement in Virtual Reality/Extended Reality as its high potential to increase interactivity could be beneficial to leverage. While a lot of hospitals and clinics have been trying to incorporate entertainment into their rehabilitation programs, a lot of them are just providing TV screens for patients to distract themselves while they carry out their rehab exercises, resulting in a single-way input of entertainment for them.

Building up on that lack of intractability, our project creates a two-way communication where patients can look at the soothing landscape in their headset and listen to the music and at the same time, jam and play along to the music. From our observations, we believe that entertainment is the most effective when the user is involved in the creation process, and in our case, users will be majorly involved in the music creation process. This will also help a lot with distracting patients from pain and the dull nature of physiotherapy.

Left for Bread is a multiplayer horror game with a comedic element embedded into the experience. Setting it aside from the classic horror genre is the comedic intent: being chased by a loaf of bread provides an interesting contrast to the typical run-from-monster archetype. There are five playable characters, namely flour, eggs, salt, water, and the baguette. The baguette seeks to hunt down the ingredient players as the game begins to become stronger; to take down the baker who neglected the oven, the baguette requires the ingredients from which it can extract strength.

Travel through time, between two different years of Tamiko’s life to solve puzzles and repair her relationship with her mother.

Video games and entertainment are one of the most common applications for VR, but narrative games are still one of the more underdeveloped genres. Similar to how the game Before Your Eyes was “revolutionary” in its way of having its player interact with the game via another modality (eyetracking), our game set out to have another unique modality for the player to use (sitting and standing). As the capabilities of virtual reality continue to grow, the prospect of a player using an otherwise ordinary action to interact with a game becomes more possible. Our exploration of sitting/standing as a mechanic within a storytelling game may prove to be significant in the future as something that hasn’t yet been done before by other games.

"Cosmic Cube Crush" is a virtual reality experience that takes the excitement and mechanics of a classic match-3 game to the next level. Placing players inside a 3D cube universe, the game challenges users to manipulate the universe around them, creating combinations to clear levels, and progressing through an engaging environment, such as a warm, cozy kitchen top, the space-time continuum, or colorful galaxies. Our hope is to introduce a new conceptual game to the VR user base and is designed for all ages.

Imagine a world where conquering phobias is an empowering and gamified experience. Our project pioneers Extended Reality (XR) therapy for phobias, addressing the spectrum from mild discomfort to paralyzing panic attacks. XR uniquely allows users' agency to control their experiences, with a safety net to halt virtual fear at any moment. Focusing initially on Trypophobia (fear of holes), we creatively manipulate and gamify the experience, incentivizing users with virtual rewards.