The tech world is abuzz about artificial intelligence, but there’s still plenty to learn and accomplish in virtual and augmented reality, judging from the projects created by University of Washington computer science students who just completed a 10-week AR/VR Capstone course offered through the UW Reality Lab.
The room was filled with energy at a recent Demo Day inside the Bill & Melinda Gates Center at the UW’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering in Seattle, as seven student teams showed their projects.
Continue reading for key takeaways, and see videos of all seven projects below.
The state of VR and AR: In conversations at the event, students were pragmatic about VR and AR overall, fully aware that job prospects in the field are less than stellar right now, as evidenced by job cuts at Oculus parent company Meta, and the Microsoft Hololens team. However, several said they still came away with valuable experience and insights.
“Even if they might not go off and become VR or AR developers, there are a lot of different applications in industry that they can go into that are related to the space,” explained John Akers, director of research and education for the UW Reality Lab, who teaches the course with Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman, Allen School associate professor.
Market potential: In some cases, such as a virtual realty presentation app that would require everyone in the audience to wear an Oculus 2 headset, students said they might have been interested in trying to commercialize their projects, but didn’t think there was enough market penetration yet to make a good business case.
AR vs. VR: This is the seventh year that the AR/VR capstone course has been offered, and the first year that Microsoft Hololens 2 augmented reality headsets were offered as an option. Students were almost evenly split between AR and VR, with three teams opting to develop for the Hololens 2, and four for the Oculus Quest 2.
Development tools: Students developing in augmented reality used Microsoft’s MRTK toolkit on the Unity cross-platform game engine. Several students said they encountered quirks and challenges, but worked through them (with support from Microsoft) and accepted them as a natural part of working on a cutting-edge platform.
Their projects were all the more impressive given that the teams actually had less than 10 weeks to work on them, after initially getting up to speed on the available development tools, and hearing from guest speakers.
Here’s a rundown, with overview videos created by each team.
PrezVR: A tool for creating and delivering immersive presentations, with animated objects, in virtual reality. The hypothetical use case was an architect pitching an airport redesign.
Black Mirror: An augmented reality app for Microsoft Hololens 2 that uses QR codes to give event participants, such as recruiters at a networking forum, access to information that others choose to reveal about themselves.
NASA SUITS Geology: This augmented reality app uses computer vision and machine learning to identify points of interest on a real-world landscape. This was developed as part of the NASA SUITS (Spacesuit User Interface Technologies for Students) Challenge.
Dynamic Sculpture Gallery and Deformable Ceramics: Both of these projects were developed in conjunction with interdisciplinary artist Timea Tihanyi, allowing users to interact with and experience art in new ways.
TowAR Defense: This augmented reality game for the Hololens 2 was very popular at Demo Day, with people waiting for demos for most of the two-hour session. The game lets users place artillery and defenses on top of a real world environment, then watch to see if their strategy is effective against waves of attacks.
XRcise: This virtual reality game requires users to successfully complete exercise challenges to escape an island.
Learn more about the AR/VR Capstone Course here.
