RAM: Reaching Alienated Minds

Inspiration

• On January 22nd 2025, merely one day before this competition, a tragedy befell Antioch High School in Nashville Tennessee. A 17-Year-Old school shooter, inspired by online reactionaries, opened fire on their classmates, killing one and himself. RAM: Reaching Alienated Minds was born of our ambition to utilize technology toward liberatory social aims and address the alt-right pipeline radicalizing our children.

What it does

• Alt-right groups are targeting our youth—manipulating their emotions, planting seeds of hate, and driving them toward acts of violence. They exploit loneliness and confusion to groom young minds to adopt beliefs of false consciousness. It’s time to fight back with RAM: Reaching Alienated Minds. Through this immersive VR experience, youth learn to recognize manipulation, resist harmful messages, and build emotional intelligence. RAM empowers them to find calm, balance, and the tools to stay strong against hate. RAM: Recognize manipulation. Assert emotional strength. Master resilience.

How we built it

• Meta Quest 2 • Unity • C# • Adobe Photoshop • XR Interaction Toolkit • OpenXR

Challenges we ran into

• In the middle of the development process there was a period after importing the 3D scene into the Meta Quest where the experience wouldn’t load due to poor graphical optimization, but it was quickly resolved with help from a mentor and the removal of problem assets.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• As a team of 3 artists, 1 writer/project manager, and 1 developer, we are quite proud of our ability to collaborate to produce this experience within the time constraints despite our unconventional distribution of roles.

What we learned

• Throughout the development of this experience, we’ve learned great lessons concerning the efficient management of 3D assets and textures for program optimization. • Likewise, we’ve learned many effective library organization tools that would improve our workflow; eliminating time wasted on procedural data entry in favor of time dedicated toward developing our core mechanics.

What's next for RAM: Reaching Alienated Minds

• We would love to continue the development of key features that didn’t make it before the submission deadline and share it as an educational resource upon completion: • As the user progresses throughout the experience the overstimulating components (audio, lighting, 3D clutter) would disappear alongside the successful identification of propaganda. • An ending sequence representing the user embracing connection.