Best Vive Hack Winner | MIT Reality Virtually Hackathon 2017
We created an experience to promote physical activity among tenants in hospitals and nursing homes. Our goal was to create a virtual reality application to assist the elderly acheive physical movement while in hospitals and nursing homes. We simulated walking through a park where movement was controlled by stationary exercise equipment and direction by their controllers.
We built a prototype to solve both these problems by encouraging movement in friendlier spaces, such as parks or nature reserves while using exercise a HOVR leg swing (now known as SITFLOW) and using their hands to interact with the environment. This benefited users twofold: patients can exercise more, which has been clinically shown to decrease time spent in treatment and reduce the number of recurring visits, and therapeutic benefits, as virtual reality provides freedom from the confines of a hospital room, which can reduce anxiety and stress.
I used Vive trackers alongside the Vive headset to track the player’s movements, and assisted my team members in calibrating and tracking steps. I worked on creating several interactions for players, such as the fail-safe orientation controls for users who may have strayed from our predesignated path, the flock of birds that would fly away when you came close to them, and the environment design using Unity terrains.
