Cyber Lab

Inspiration

Recently due to the COVID-19 pandemic, learning has become increasingly difficult. This is especially strenuous for people that require direct physical access to equipment like labware and appliances. New doctors and nurses are unable to get valuable in-person training. This project was aimed to help solve these issues.

What it does

During this Hackathon, we built a virtual system for assisting the healthcare industry. In this system, healthcare workers can be interactively trained and educated on various advacned healthcare concepts. Currently, the system educates on how vaccines are developed by allowing healthcare workers to interact with virtual patients and practice without risk.

How we built it

This project was developed using the Unity Game Engine utilizing the Oculus Integration libraries. All code is written in C#.

Challenges we ran into

VR Development in Unity is a new topic for us, so we started this project unfamiliar with many of its functionalities and abilities. We had to spend time learning and experimenting with Unity and the Oculus. Due to our classes and exams, how we delegated our time played a significant role in the overall development of our project. Since we are primarily focused on Computer Science we were not aware of the various biology and chemistry / general healthcare information that was needed to make this project successful, so we had to spend special time doing research in those areas to gain a better understanding of the healthcare industry.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we were able to overcome the challenges we faced and produce a completed project that could be useful to the real world in the near future. We are also proud of all that we learned over the course of this project and the Hackathon.

What we learned

We learned a lot about XR systems, more specifically VR systems. We also learned more about Unity and how to develop VR applications through it. Learning new information in fields that were previously foreign to us, helped shape our understanding of the interdisciplinary attributes of computer science and how we can make tangible projects that impact the real world.

What's next for Cyber Lab

This project is a prototype of what can be done. This technology can span beyond just vaccines and into other areas of the healthcare industry such as surgery or telemedicine. The virtual interaction with patients is also limited in this project and can be easily expanded upon in the future.