Extended Reality @ Berkeley
Extended Reality @ Berkeley
Extended Reality @ Berkeley
I want to start working with VR / AR
Dive straight into developing with us. We're expanding the horizons on HCI and interfaces with AR drone interactions, creating fluid hand-tracking interfaces, fliming stunning 360 cinemas, tackling SLAM challenges in mobile AR, and helping visualize CRISPR's innovative technology - to name a few.
I want to learn to develop VR
VR / AR is one of the hottest growing industries in computing, consumer technology, and is rapidly advancing computer vision. Its applications range from entertainment to medical. If you have a background in CS, have dabbled in Unity, and want to take it to the next step - join us and we'll teach you the rest.
Fall 2019 Projects
Team Leads: Manish Kondapolu, Elliot ChoiAugmented Reality for Visually Impaired People is a mission to help VIP's navigate in a sighted world. Through the use of the HoloLens' spatial mapping capabilities, we aim to provide users with sonic information about their environment, ranging from reading text to warning users about potential obstacles. Our goals for this year is to improve upon the capabilities of the current version by implementing new features and streamlining the user experience.
Team Leads: Shreya Sudarshana, Joshua YangClinical biofeedback has proven to be an effective way of treating anxiety, depression, and other disorders, and VR could help that even more by providing further immersive biofeedback visualizations. During the 2018-2019 school year, we formed a team to work with SDKs for EEGs and ECGs that integrate into the Unity game engine. With a combination of students with backgrounds in animation, VR development, and machine learning, we developed a minimal viable product, a VR game that utilizes the users’ EEG brain waves as a mode of control. The MVP currently works with the Oculus Rift, and uses the Muse headband, a highly portable consumer EEG device, to achieve these mappings. This semester, we hope to revamp our MVP and deploy a gamified version to the app store. We’re expecting our team members to commit about 5 hours per week to the team, and are seeking to recruit 1-2 new members who are skilled in game development, have worked with Unity, or have worked with animation. Even if students do not have prior development experience, we encourage anyone with genuine passion for Biofeedback VR to apply.
Team Leads: Ilian Herzi, Revekka KostoevaBrain Games is developing a virtual reality based rehabilitation treatment for patients with mild traumatic brain injuries (mTBIs). Athletes, drivers, veterans, and essentially everyone is at risk for mTBIs. For such a prevalent medical issue, surprisingly, treatment is either too expensive or mediocre, at best. Brain Games is addressing this issue by developing an accessible and affordable treatment. We base our cognitive training tasks on peer-reviewed literature and adapt them for virtual reality. Our goal this semester is to develop a deployable VR cognitive rehabilitation application ready for clinical trials and write a publication based on our results. We are looking for developers with experience in Unity3D, with virtual reality development experience being a plus.
Team Leads: Siri Cao, Eric LiEvent Horizon is a story-driven, escape-room-style game, in which the player is guided by an AI assistant to complete various tasks, with the final goal of fixing the spaceship. The concept is inspired by the 2016 movie Passengers. The models are developed in MAYA and this game is developed in Unity3D. Currently, we have finished building the environment and coding the locomotion scheme. The plan for next semester would be refactoring current Unity code (probably with vrtk), filling in the storyline, designing puzzles and tasks and then implementing them. We hope to share our findings with the world by publishing the game on the Oculus store by the end of our two-semester timeline. This semester we are looking for new members with Unity experience and/or story-telling game or escape room game development experience. The estimated time commitment would be 5-6hr/week. If you meet the requirements and are interested in Scifi story theme/ escape room puzzles, don’t hesitate to shoot us your application!
Team Leads: Joy MaThrough experimentation, narratives, and research, we further the current immersive cinema + 360 video body of knowledge and language, defining the standards. We bring the design process to immersive content creation. With this approach, we split the semester into three phases — themed around art, documentary, and narrative. Each phase has the following steps: 1. Ideate -- Gather inspiration, brainstorm ideas, storyboard and script, 2. Create -- Capture 360 footage, record spatial audio, stitch, and bring it into post-production, and 3. Analyze -- Showcase the experience to as many people as possible, reflect on feedback, and consolidate findings into a Medium blog post. This iterative process lets us learn from errors made during the production process and apply our new learnings to future VR content. our goal for the semester is 1-2 360 degree films; engage everyone in the pre-production, shooting, and post-production.
Team Leads: Julian Cervantes, Kathy Kong Immersive Realities focuses on using industry standard VR technologies to create content that excites and inspires others. We heavily rely on visual quality and graphics to immerse our users into a new realm, only capable through Virtual Reality. Whether its experiences, animations, or games, we want our final products to be beautiful pieces of work that everyone can be proud of.
This semester Immersive Realities is planning to create an immersive VR animation. If you would like to create a cool short, preferably something in the horror genre, then this the project team for you! We are looking for people with experience in 3D modeling (Maya, Blender, etc. ) and story telling to help us create the environment and props that will populate the scenery. Any work with Unity development is always a plus, but not a requirement.
Team Leads: Peru Dayani, Jessica Lee ISAACS is an open-source project to envision new ways for human users to intuitively interface and collaborate with aerial drones around virtual and augmented reality technologies.
The ISAACS Radiation Visualization sub-team is collaborating with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s applied nuclear physics researchers to visualize a terrain and its radiation in AR/VR in real-time.
The ISAACS MultiDrone sub-team is collaborating with the FHL Vive Center for Enhanced Reality to conduct research exploring multi-drone control VR interfaces and expanding our VR interface to control a Matrice 100 drone in real time.
We are looking for innovative and motivated individuals with some prior experience with VR/AR development and ROS and a passion for research in human computer interfaces. Expect to devote from 6-8 hours a week on meetings and development.
Team Leads: Claudia Korea, Adam NowolrowskiPlay VR games competitively as part of an official Cal Esports team! Currently the team plays Beat Saber and Echo Arena as part of an intercollegiate VR Esports league. Although we have some world-class players, experience is not required to sign up. We also stream on Twitch, if you're interested in the content creation side of things.
Team Lead: Jonathan SunVR LRC is an early-stage VR game development project focused on capturing the feeling of taking part in a type of military training exercise known as a “leadership reaction course”. These exercises consist of short obstacle courses with objectives that require extensive collaborative activity from a team of trainees in order to overcome, with activities varying from assembling and maintaining makeshift bridges to carrying large objects and scaling walls. Key features we are working to implement within the VR environment include having multiple players pick up the same object, throwing and catching certain objects between players, designing a locomotion scheme with adequate precision, to name a few. As this is an early-stage venture coming to its second semester of development, the core mechanics of the game are still being put together, and we hope to be able to put together a functioning proof-of-concept prototype by the end of this semester. We are currently looking for applicants with experience (or eagerness to learn) developing in Unity/C# who are willing to commit at least 5 hours of work per week.
Team Lead: Abigail Lomibao XR@B's Outreach team is a group of passionate students who are excited about the future of AR/VR in our communities. The Outreach team is a great way to get introduced to XR@B and we welcome students of all interests! Our mission is to bridge the gap between XR and our surrounding community, volunteering at the Berkeley Public Library, BAMFA, the SF Zoo, and other local events. Our team also helps organize on campus events such as VXPC. Time commitment is less than two hours a week so you can be a part of other project teams as well. Not only are we dedicated to XR pedagogy, but we're also a family! If you're interested in chasing new feelings and learning more about XR, connecting with your community, or having fun casual outings, Outreach is the place for you!
Team Leads: Yoneo Arai, Austin Davis, Eric Feng, Paxtan Laker, Benjamin Wu The Education Branch is consisted of 5 subteams.
Each member whose sole team is the Education Branch in XR@B is expected to be a part of two subteams, all members who also work on another project team in XR@B is only expected to do one.
DeCal (Austin and Ben) | (Wants 2 more members)
The DeCal Team is the subteam of the education branch that runs and facilitates the DeCal. Their work focuses on physically running the class, teaching, and coming up with new ideas for improving the material, finding partnerships, and creating relationships with the students. They have also historically done well in securing funding for keeping the class running and expanding class size.
Modules (Eric) | (Wants 2 more members)
The Modules subteam of the education branch is responsible for creating new tutorial “modules” for both the DeCal and the DeCal website. The team works closely with the DeCal team in improving the curriculum and also often helps with creating completely new material.
Workshops (Peru) | (Wants 3 more members)
The Workshops subteam of the education branch is responsible for supplying XR@Berkeley with the potential to offer “boiled down” workshops of the DeCal material to other students. Historically this has been offered to members of the club, members of different interested clubs, and High School students around the Bay. We plan to expand this team to offer workshops to basically “anyone who can get 20 interested people in a room”.
Textbooks (Yoneo) | (Wants 3 more members)
The textbooks subteam of the education branch is currently working with the Augmented Cognition Lab on campus to create a VR Textbook based on the original DeCal curriculum and new material designed specifically for the textbook. The textbook is designed to get anyone up to speed on the industry, VR development, and XR theory.
Research* (Open for Recruitment) | (Wants 4 more members)
The Research subteam is an open-ended project that was temporarily put on-hold last semester due to lack of sufficient members in the Education Branch. We have a partnership with 3 LB Games to create a research project to create and carry out an experiment-based research paper on the efficiency of “teaching using VR”. The subteam is looking for members and a lead.
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