Immersive technologies hold the key to transforming how we interact with the digital world by creating more engaging, realistic, and interactive experiences. Reimagining Rochester’s library collections, these technologies offer an opportunity to transform teaching and learning. By integrating VR (virtual reality) into library resources, we can invite users to not just passively consume information, but to actively engage with it.

The vision at Studio X was a clear focus on presenting and celebrating the diverse and global history of alchemical practices. From the outset, the team was committed to promoting a more inclusive and expansive view of history, challenging the traditional Eurocentric narratives of alchemy and highlighting its rich traditions across various cultures.

Our design process was rooted in the idea of creating an experience that anyone could enjoy, regardless of background or ability. Accessibility was key, and we focused on making the virtual environment intuitive, comfortable, and enriching for all participants. Features like force grab and teleportation movement were employed to reduce motion sickness and conflicting sensory exposure.

In collaboration with a dedicated UI/UX team, our coding/development team focused on creating an intuitive interface that enables users to interact seamlessly with the virtual environment. Numerous iterations were run through to ensure a system where players could pick up tools, mix ingredients, and observe the transformation of materials—all while maintaining the sense of immersion crucial to the experience.

Our dev team worked extensively with Unity’s C# .NET framework to enable smooth and responsive interactions, ensuring that the physics, animations, and user inputs felt intuitive and realistic, in conjunction to maintaining consistent source control through Unity's integrated Version Control System over the course of two years.

Aurum has evolved through multiple generations of talented students and leaders, each contributing unique perspectives from their diverse backgrounds to advance the project's mission of expanding digital literacy. There are many to mention, but among those I want to highlight are my project manager, Mila Paymukhina, now at Netflix; the resident XR developer, Liam O'Leary; and project mentor, Meaghan Moody, Assistant Director of Studio X, as well as in addition to all of the omega talented undergrad peers I was fortunate enough to work alongside.

Aurum has been featured at multiple symposiums and research expos, and it's been an honor to showcase its impact in the field of immersive technology. Among the key events where Aurum was presented are the RIT Frameless Symposium and the Studio X Annual XR Research Showcase, collectively attracting over 500 attendees. In addition to its role as a research project, Aurum also serves as an educational model, highlighting the potential of VR in enhancing teaching and learning experiences.

Find more information about Aurum on the Studio X website

The concept of Study Spaces was born during the 10th anniversary of RIT’s premier hackathon, BrickHack X, and was developed alongside an incredibly talented team, including Kayla Lin (now of Ramp), Bon Anh Nguyen, and Jassem Toumi. We all shared a passion for using software to empower users, driven by a common goal to create meaningful, impactful solutions that address real-world challenges.

Our inspiration stemmed from popular educational platforms of our childhood, like Kahoot and Quizizz, which brought a sense of fun and competition to learning. And recognizing the huge wave of trendy products powered by AI, we collaborated to build on that foundation by designing a platform to optimize the study environment for students by streamlining that gamified experience that allows them to practice learning materials and test their knowledge against peers in a friendly competitive setting using AI to dynamically tailor quiz content to the user’s study materials.

After solidifying our concept, we turned our focus to selecting the right tech stack for the project. Driven by a desire to push boundaries and explore new technologies, we saw Cloudflare's challenge to leverage their new tool, Workers AI, as an exciting opportunity to implement machine learning models on a global, serverless GPU network, bringing our idea to life. Kayla, being our senior and an absolute front-end wizard guru, brought extensive experience with building out Express.js and Next.js apps, guiding us forward with her expertise. We moved to the next steps of setting up the core infrastructure for multiplayer sessions, which involves supporting real-time interaction to allow multiple users joining quizzes simultaneously.

To enable this seamless experience where players could easily join and leave game rooms, we worked with Socket.IO to enable reliable, real-time, two-way communication capabilities. To manage the dynamic interactions essential to our multiplayer quiz environment, we built out an architecture of event-driven communication. We were then able to maintain persistent connections between the server and clients, ensuring that updates—such as new questions, player responses, and scores—were instantly synchronized across all users in asession.

With our connection in place, we turned to building out the backend to manage the core functionalities and data flow of Study Spaces. Using Express.js as our basis, we set up routes for session management and data handling, integrating MySQL as our database to store essential data—such as user profiles, study materials, and session history—ensuring scalability as the platform grows. And with Workers AI hooked up to process content and generate questions in real time, we could relay our dynamic quizzes to the frontend through Socket.IO to display the game to the users synchronously. We additionally implemented game logic to handle room creation, score updates, and player actions, enabling smooth, interactive sessions for all participants.

Now all of this intricate backend would be for naught without a frontend capable of delivering an intuitive and engaging experience for its users. Crafting the components for quiz interactions, score displays, and anything visual we wanted came easy with Kayla at the helm (Follow her on Twitter!), and the gamified, collaborative experience we envisioned for Study Spaces came to life as we put the finishing touches on bridging our interface with the processes we worked on behind the scene.

Through our combined efforts, Study Spaces grew from a simple concept to a fully fledged, AI-driven study tool committed to transforming how users view engaging with learning materials. By focusing on how we can make learning platforms more interactive and accessible and blending them with our current day cutting-edge technology, we reinforced our commitment to developing tools that use technology to enhance educational experiences and build communities.

Our project’s impact was recognized at BrickHack X, where we were honored with the 'Best AI Hack' award presented by Cloudflare. As judges, fellow hackers, and other users viewed and tested our product, we received a wealth of new ideas and valuable perspectives. For instance, a professor suggested that the platform could be especially beneficial for creating tests tailored to student learning needs. This experience affirmed our excitement for how tech products can meet the diverse needs of different clients, users, and communities, and we’re all eager to pursue the next horizon of learning and innovation.

Find more information about Study Spaces on our Devpost

Simple Email Beacon traces its origins from a summer brainstorming session with a friend, where we saw an opportunity to develop a tracking tool that could capture key data points (e.g., IP address, server location, time) and empower users to monitor access to data-sensitive content. Recognizing that over 90% of cybercrimes are initiated through email, we saw the chance to make a project that could serve as a public good that anyone could intuitively use and benefit from.

Find more information about Simple Email Beacon on our Repo

SAPIEN Coach was an intuitive virtual avatar platform driven by Large Language Models that I had the opportunity to contribute to as a part of my summer research internship at the ROC-HCI laboratory. The platform allows users to customize their virtual agent's personality, background, and conversation premise, thus providing a rich, immersive interaction experience. Furthermore, after the virtual meeting, the user can choose to get the conversation analyzed and receive actionable feedback on their communication skills.

The implications of this technology were vast, with potential applications in a wide range of fields, including education, training, and mental health. SAPIEN Coach offers a unique opportunity to leverage a higher-fidelity platform to boost engagement, improve learning outcomes, and provide valuable insights into user behavior.

The lab prototyped many such applications, including a simulated patient experience to train doctors for stressful conversations, such as End-of-life care. We also built out a virtual tutor who was all-knowledgeable and could help educate you in any topic. We even experimented with a dating course to help users practice their one-liners before the big day (can't quite recommend it just yet though). The platform was overall designed to be highly customizable, allowing users to tailor conversations to their specific needs and preferences. The agents are supported to be multilingual as well, supporting a wide range of languages and dialects to ensure that users from all over the world could benefit from the technology.

Find more information about SAPIEN Coach on the Repo

Find more information about the UR Medicine's motion initiatives on their LinkedIn