Immersive games, mixed reality training and a system that operates a robot remotely were among the projects presented and demonstrated last week at Johns Hopkins University’s Whiting School of Engineering.

These innovations were the culmination of an interdisciplinary course in augmented reality taught by Ehsan Azimi, a Hopkins alumnus, faculty member of the Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare, and Nassir Navab, assistant professor of computer science.

Augmented reality, also known as augmented reality, is technology that superimposes a computer-generated image onto a user’s view of the real world, providing a fusion of physical and virtual realities. Experts say AR has potential uses in medicine, retail, education, manufacturing, retail, and more.

Graduate and advanced undergraduate students in Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Biomedical and Mechanical Engineering, Robotics, and Engineering Management have completed the course. They spent the last five weeks of the semester working as a team under the guidance of their mentors to design and develop their AR applications.

“To foster creativity in student designs, there weren’t many restrictions,” Azimi said. “The system had to be able to demonstrate the benefits of using extended reality and include at least three features taught in the courses, such as tracking, gesture interaction, sonification, and perceptual visualization.”

Instructors also included design thinking in this year’s curriculum to encourage students to focus on who would ultimately use their technology. Design thinking is a problem-solving approach that focuses on building empathy with the user to solve their real problem.

“As the technology around augmented and virtual reality evolves rapidly, we want to provide students with an experience where they can tackle a diverse set of problems rather than scripted instructions and methods just to pass a course,” Azimi said.

The projects included a system allowing more precise joint injections on patients and a system allowing players to envision their environment as a huge chessboard.

Guest judges from Microsoft Mixed Reality, MedVR, the University of Michigan, and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine participated in the demonstrations and gave students feedback on their projects.

“Our goal is for students on this course to be able to pursue more advanced graduate studies or go directly to work in the growing immersive technology industry, in various fields such as medicine, games, education and manufacturing” , Azimi said.

The teaching and class assistants for the course were Sing Chun Lee, Yihao Liu, Alejandro Martin-Gomez, and Wei-Lun Huang.

A full list of project demos includes:

• Planning and Visualizing Needle Trajectories for Facet Joint Injection in Patients Undergoing Recurrent Appointments, by Qihang Li, Mingxu Liu, Guanyu Song, Yifan Yin, Pupei Zhu
• Surgical Guidance Strategies for Continuum Manipulators, by Nick Zhang, Jan Bartels
• Using HMD’s Integrated Environmental Cameras for Out of Sight Object Detection, by Kaiwen Wang, Zixuan Wang, Janice Lin
• Teleoperation in mixed reality, by An Chi Chen, Muhammad Hadi
• 3D editor for clinical training, by Bohua Wan, Karine Song
• Chess in a Room, by Ryan Rubel, Yumeng Bie, Purvi Raval
• AR Dixit, by John Han, Aaron Rhee, Rodrigo Murillo
• Line-Based Shape Perception in Augmented Medical Reality, by Ali Rachidi, Deepti Hegde, Kavan Bansal
• Using AR Interactions to Improve Science Education in the Lab, by Siddharth Ananth, Chinat Yu, Walee Attia, Rahul Swaminathan

This content was originally published here.