CHCI Team Wins IEEE 3D UI Contest

Each year at the IEEE Virtual Reality Conference  there is a 3D User Interfaces Contest. Students from Doug Bowman’s 3D Interaction Group had significant success in this contest in its early years (1st place in 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2014). This year, the CHCI team was again selected as the winning team!

This year’s contest was on the theme of “Challenging Pandemics.” Participating teams created 3D UI projects that addressed the COVID-19 pandemic in some way. Teams submitted a two-page abstract and a short video, and then presented their work at the online conference.

There were 17 accepted submissions this year (the most ever) from Greece, France, Scotland, Colombia, England, Germany, Brazil, and several other teams from the US. teams all over the world.

The CHCI team’s submission was entitled "Fantastic Voyage 2021: Using Interactive VR Storytelling to Explain Targeted COVID-19 Vaccine Delivery to Antigen-presenting Cells.” The students designed and implemented a virtual reality experience that shrinks the user and places them in a “nanobot” injected into the human body to ensure delivery of a COVID vaccine. The experience uses rich storytelling, characters who help the user along the way, and interactive elements for identifying antigen-presenting cells and delivering vaccines. It engages users while teaching them about how mRNA-based COVID vaccines work in the human body. 

Team members were:

• Lei Zhang (team leader, iPhD student)
  
• Feiyu Lu (CS PhD student)
  
• Shakiba Davari (CS PhD student)
  
• Nicolas Gutkowski (CS MS student)
  
•  Lee Lisle (CS PhD student)
•  Luke Schlueter (CS undergraduate student)
•  Ibrahim Tahmid (CS PhD student)

Congratulations to the students for their great work!