Using virtual reality, data, and hardware to connect the digital reality with the physical and the internal human emotional realities.
medVR is building a Medical Accelerator to drive the adoption of immersive technologies in healthcare.
As the Director of Innovation, I designed and coordinated the medVR Apple Vision Pro Medical Design Sprint to guide 27 XR developers and designers through learning native development for Apple Vision Pro and building demos for medical challenge questions.
MIT Reality Hack is an annual immersive technologies hackathon taking place in January at MIT. Teams in the Hardware Hack track merge custom hardware and software with existing virtual/augmented reality devices to create novel applications in haptics, sensing, human-computer-interfaces, and more.
As the lead of the Hardware Hack, I oversaw the day-to-day logistics related to this track to ensure smooth operations for the participants and sponsors. I also started the Hardware Curious program to support newcomers to custom electronics and hardware.
Virtual reality mostly resides in the digital world. Headsets use 2 displays to show digital images to our eyes. Yet, we live in the physical world and still want physical interactions.
I went into the MIT Reality Hack in January 2024 with an idea: to form a strong team around building something to connect the physical and digital worlds in virtual reality. Block Party was born that weekend, and won silver medal for Best Hack Overall, Best of Hardware, and runner up for Augmented Productivity.
Following up the strong start, I am currently working on v0.1 — a smaller and more robust version that we can easily carry for demos as we explore use cases.
Visit our Devpost to learn more about the original hackathon project.
Teaching others to create for virtual reality
As an emerging medium of communication and story-telling, creating experiences in virtual reality should be accessible for everyone.
I teach hands-on workshops and classes to introduce VR development to students at MIT and the general public.
AWARE
What if the virtual world responded not just to what you did (i.e. controller inputs) but also how you felt? This idea is already being used in some game studios to adjust difficulty levels based off the player’s frustration level.
In AWARE, is a VR experience to help users de-escalate from strong emotions with box breathing. In this project, I linked a heart-rate monitor to the Quest headset through bluetooth so the experience can respond to the user’s biometric feedback.
Y. Jenny Wang, PhD 