Students at UW (University of Washington) presented demos of the AR and VR apps developed by them, ranging from a dodgeball game to a customizable zen garden.

University of Washington’s Allen School and Reality Lab supported the capstone course virtually. The participating teams used WebXR to include remote students.

Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman, an associate professor at the Allen School, said WebXR helped students learn VR faster. The platform helped “level the playing field” for students working from home.

“Some people have GPUs and VR-ready machines. Some just have laptops. It’s a struggle to set up everyone with Unity and a good development environment.” – Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman, Associate Professor, Allen School.

Kemelmacher-Shlizerman said that students used WebXR to code in Javascript, and they started showing results in less than a week. According to her, it allowed for more exciting apps supporting multiplayer networking.

“I am particularly excited about the combination of machine learning and computer vision into VR and AR. Particularly related to health, fitness, and sports. VR/AR is a futuristic area that we must explore; there are definitely exciting components for the future there.” – Kemelmacher-Shlizerman.

The University of Washington projects included GuitXR that enables guitar players to learn and advance their guitar skills. The game helps players visualize chords and music tabs.

BallARs, which is a basketball shooting game enables players to analyze their shooting to an NBA player.

VR Dodgeball resembles a physical dodgeball game. Zendin provides users with the space to create a zen garden and do yoga, meditate, etc.

Follow us on LinkedIn

Read other Articles