Extended Reality @ Berkeley
DREAM THE CHANGE
Dive straight into making reality with us. We are defining new paradigms in HCI with VR enhanced human-UAV collaboration, revolutionize healthcare with novel neurological therapies, and leverage biofeedback to create powerful experiences of harmony and insight ‒ just to name a few.
Help the change
With more than 50 active members and over 600 alumni, we are the largest XR student organization in the world. We subscribe to the Berkeley approach to living together and building technology, and many of our alumni are changing the world at organizations that have sponsored us. We currently offer three types of sponsorship: Infosession (where you get to talk about your organization and recruit from our pool of talent), Workshop (where you show us how your product works), and Project (where we work together on a new idea). We also offer opportunities free of charge for non-profits and charities.
Learn a few Tricks
XR is among the hottest growing industries
of the last five years, and has already impacted
filmmaking and healthcare in ways that were
previously unimagined. It is only a matter of time
until it also overtakes mainstream consumer electronics
and human-robot collaboration.
As such, the excitement for XR
is currently pushing innovations in a number of fields,
ranging all the way up from computer vision and graphics,
down to harware design and biosensors. XR is
a trully interdisciplinary field, in which
you may apply knowledge from your own niche. If
you have taken CS61A, and feel like reality can
become your creative material
‒ join us and we will teach you the
rest.
(Not offered for this fall 2021 semester, please check back in spring)
The Makers of Reality
‒
Blossom VR is a game that aims to creatively enhance meditation and relaxation experiences in virtual reality. Inspired by the effectiveness of biofeedback treatments, we developed a minimal viable product that utilizes the users’ movements in VR, and optionally Apple Watch biosensor data, to provide feedback about how well the user is performing a relaxation technique as well as the users’ improvement over time. So far, we have built several mindfulness minigames that are inspired by harmonic breathing, movement meditation, taichi, and heart-rate based biofeedback mechanisms, and we hope that there will be a relaxing experience for everyone to try. Through playing these minigames, players can also level up their characters and also gain new collectables to put in a mindfulness garden. Overall, Blossom VR is a relaxing world that players can revisit day to day in order to fade out the stress of life and reconnect with their inner selves.
‒
BRAVE strives to introduce time tested medical rehabilitation exercises to groundbreaking VR technology. The idea behind the exploration of Brain Rehabilitation in a Virtual Environment is to fashion a personalized, adaptable, independent, and entertaining rehabilitation plan.
‒
ISAACS is an undergraduate-led research group within the Center for
Augmented Cognition of the FHL Vive Center for Enhanced Reality. Our research is in
human-UAV interaction, with a focus on teleoperation,
telesensing, and multi-agent interaction.
We are also collaborating with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to perform 3D reconstruction of the environment via state-of-the-art methods in radiation detection. Our vision is to create a scalable open source platform for Beyond Line of Sight Flight compatible with any UAV or sensor suite.
‒
ROAR is the FHL Vive Center for Enhanced Reality autonomous driving research group.
Our goal is to advance XR and AI technologies used in vehicles,
through a fun intercollegiate driving competition at the heart of the iconic Berkeley campus.
‒
The Good Fight is a project team within the XR@B family. The Good Fight is a combat-focused game, inspired by game mechanics from a variety of games, such as Beat Saber, Pokémon GO, and Reign. Hoping to explore how immersive virtual reality can be by fusing speech recognition with virtual reality, The Good Fight will involve the player speaking aloud and physically moving at the same time.
This semester, due to COVID-19, we plan to shift gears and explore AR development. We’re excited to create FlutterSwARm, an interactive butterfly experience. In FlutterSwARm, users interact with virtual butterflies, watching them fly around in their own butterfly garden. Watch a butterfly land on your hand or command the swarm to assemble into customizable shapes. Keep yourself on track while completing tasks by leaving your device idle to grow your garden. Then, earn features such as butterfly feeders or flowers to give to your butterflies. Enjoy the zen of a butterfly garden with FlutterSwarm!
‒
Virtual Reality painting is a form of 3D-painting done in a Virtual Reality (VR) space.
Being a relatively new kind of art form, there is a growing interest within the creative practices community to learn it.
Currently, most users learn using community posted 2D-videos on the internet, which are a screencast recording of the painting process by an instructor.
While such an approach may suffice for teaching 2D-software tools, these videos by themselves fail in delivering crucial details that required by the user to understand actions in a VR space.
We are building a robust and deployable VR-embedded tutorial system that supplements video tutorials with 3D and contextual aids directly in the user's VR environment, based on the TutoriVR research study.
‒
Architects today communicate their ideas to clients through CAD drawings & PDFs.
However, it is hard for non-technically trained clients to make meaningful decisions for their living space based of these 2D plans when all that's in front of their eyes is a gray bareshell flat.
Through Construct AR, the architects can give their clients the chance to be co-present in the physical space along with the walls of the house.
Different layouts can be spatially experimented with at the click of button in that environment and clients can walk through their house.
This will be a headset and mobile application.
‒
With VR headsets getting more and more accessible, it is clear that this technology is going to be a big part of all of our future.
We all know its potential, a place where everybody can have their own reality, a space to unleash their full potential like never seen before.
That is why we need to make sure that it is done in the right way.
Companies like Facebook that are already stealing people's attention and data from just a phone screen
will try their best to do it to the next level on a fully controlled and immersive virtual world.
The only way to stop that and let VR really prosper is by giving people a platform based on users and creators -
not on ads - that respects their privacy and that retributes them for their work instantly through the blockchain.
By using the Solana blockchain, with extremely fast and almost free transactions we are unlocking creator economies like never before, where the only revenue that doesn't go to creators and builders is used to power the computing backbone of the platform.
With the game economy, we are going to provide users a self-sustainable cloud computing platform where users will have no hardware limitations and the highest guarantees on intellectual property granted by the use of a decentralized blockchain.
This is our goal at Solarity, if you want to join the digital renaissance contact us and let’s build the future of VR together!
‒
The HandIF team looks to create both the hardware and software solution for a fully immersive hand-interaction experience in VR.
This framework will allow the grabbing, manipulation, and use of elements in a virtual environment, paired with haptic gloves to simulate the feeling of touching the environment surrounding the user.
Currently, we are working on the software behind the framework to create an accurate and realistic hand tracking experience that can be expanded for use in a variety of applications, including: training scenarios, simulations, and any other environments where precise and robust hand-tracking is necessary.
In the future, we will work to create and integrate the hardware as well, creating a complete hand-interaction system with maximum immersion.