WIMTACH partners with Luna VR for hackathon to find VR solutions for doctor’s office visits
For one night only, students from Centennial College joined forces with local artists to transform the city of Toronto.
On October 24th and 25th, WIMTACH hosted a hackathon in partnership with Luna VR CEO, Naomi Van Halteren, to answer her company’s challenge – to design a virtual reality (VR) application that distracts pediatric patients who are afraid of needles during injections at the doctor’s office. 28 Centennial College students from various Software Engineering programs worked together in their respective groups to best address this challenge for the client, who was present for the presentations of solutions via Skype. Luna VR is a Canadian company that specializes in creating VR-powered healthcare solutions for healthcare providers with patients who are afraid of needles.
Over the two days, student groups worked to create VR environments, build characters, write scripts and sync their content to the process of receiving a needle injection. While there was one challenge, each group was given a different version of the challenge based on specific demographics, such as gender and age, to increase the number of real-time solutions that Van Halteren would see. Additionally, diversifying the challenge for each group facilitates unique experiential learning opportunities for students.
“The most challenging part of the hackathon was learning Unity [the VR game environment software] from scratch. But the experience was great and we learned how to make stories and narratives,” said Group one members during their presentation.
After each group presented in front of their peers and Naomi Van Halteren, the judges deliberated and decided that the third group had the best solution for young boys aged 11-14. However, Van Halteren was impressed with each solution that she requested access to all of them. In the near future, WIMTACH will meet with Luna VR’s team to decide how to turn the hackathon VR applications into full, professional videos via an official applied research project.
WIMTACH is proud to support companies in accessing specialized knowledge and expertise from the vast Centennial College network. With each hackathon collaboration, WIMTACH demonstrates its commitment to producing innovative ways of addressing challenges that will benefit future generations to come.
For further information, please send press inquiries to ptyagi@centennialcollege.ca
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