High Fidelity Announce Stem VR Challenge Recipients

Back in July High Fidelity lanuched its Stem VR Challenge. The challenge was :

High Fidelity will be awarding up to three $5,000 grants to teams or individuals who, using the High Fidelity platform, can create a unit that is:

  • HMD (e.g. Oculus™) featured
  • High school age appropriate
  • STEM focused
  • Social (can be experienced by >3 people together)

In addition to the dollar amount awarded, grantees will have access to technical support directly from High Fidelity and the option to have their content hosted.

Yesterday High Fidelity announced who the recipients would be, they have chosen two projects to receive the grants. They are T.C.a.R.S: Teaching Coding – a Racing Simulation and FTL Labs PlanetDrop-VR. Both projects look very interesting.

TCars is a combination of code and fun and is described as :

An awesome racing game where you get to interact with JavaScript to customize your car’s handling, create unique power ups and optimize performance through editing the programme code with the use of the Blockly API.

The idea behind TCaRS is explained as one that wants people to learn coding by having fun :

The idea for TCaRS is based on the thought that learning coding can be boring but playing games is fun: “I want to learn to code… but….the road from typing, ‘print my name’ to making ‘Grand Theft Auto’ seems huge and demotivating”

Schools around the world have been using tools like the Raspberry Pi to teach kids coding and it’s an essential part of most High School curriculums these days, but the output from tools like this is often pretty basic-looking.

With High Fidelity, we have the chance to change this by creating the first gaming platform where users get to see and interact directly with elements of the code in order to gain
advantage – so the more you learn, the better you do. And with the benefit of VR to create a genuinely immersive experience.

The people behind TCaRS are High Fidelity Alpha users Thijs Wenker (Thoys in High Fidelity) Programmer / Web Developer (JavaScript, PHP, C#, C++) and Dan Grundy (Judas in High Fidelity) Lecturer in 3D modelling using Blender. There’s a lot more detail in the link.

PlanetDrop-VR comes from FTL Labs, who describe themselves as :

The focus of FTL is to provide transitional technology development for highly marketable technologies emerging in academia and bring new products based on this research to the marketplace.

PlanetDrop-VR looks like a very interesting project, the core game mechanic is described as :

PlanetDrop-VR is a networked multi-player game that leverages the benefits of social VR through “cooperative asymmetrical gaming”: the virtual environment is shared by the players, but each has specific information related to his or her chosen STEM specialty, provided by individualized HUDs. However, unlike a traditional “information asymmetry” game, like a card game, the goal is not to use unshared information to a players advantage to win, but rather to share that information as quickly and effectively as possible to allow the team to solve challenges and advance through a story arc of increasingly impressive accomplishments.

The educational angle comes in the form of problem solving but as it’s multi-player there’s a shared aspect too, which ticks the boxes of the STEM VR Challenge well. The game concept also looks interesting, here’s an introduction to that :

A team of three to five cross-disciplinary eco-scientist-engineers travel to the surface of the ecologically diverse planet Pomona-1 to help restore balance and harmony after a 70-year war has left it scarred and fragile. Gameplay is broken into 10-20 minute missions that start with the networked team in orbit, each within the cockpit of their own single seat MechPod vehicle. Each player is in constant communication with the other team members through a continuous voice-activated video conference (leveraging High Fidelity’s face tracking capabilities). Here, during a Mission Briefing stage, via a HUD-based consensus system, they plan their mission and choose their scientific specialty areas.

Again there’s a lot more in the link and if you find this kind of thing interesting, the links are well worth reading. High Fidelity’s VR Challenge is a great concept and demonstrates that people can and will get excited and creative about education in VR. Congratulations to both grant recipients and I look forward to seeing how these projects develop.

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