We are Real Empathy!
Who is Team Real Empathy?
It’s a squad consisting of four students from ETC class 2022. Even though we only have four, less than the average size of five, we all have a pretty successful semester of our last project. LiangYen(Leo) was a producer the previous semester and worked on compelling storytelling for an AR broadway show.
Based on the experience from last semester, now we have a better idea about how to run a project! Leading by inspiring faculty members Ricardo Washington and Ruth Comley, team Real Empathy can access the most critical resources, mentors’ advice, and experts’ knowledge.
Under a post-pandemic, it’s the first time we meet in person. We have a project room with four personal desktops, whiteboards, posters, and a sofa! It’s handy to brainstorm ideas and work on VR development in this cozy, working area. Although we are getting used to working on site instead of remotely, it’s still significant progress to go back to school! We believe this semester we will work in hybrid mode with onsite collaboration and online co-working.
Team Member:
- Liang Yen (Leo) Chou: Producer / Experience Designer
- Shanshan Yuan: UI / UX Designer / 2D Artist
- Martin Ke: Programmer
- Zijun ( Bella ) Lin: 3D Artist / Animator
What is Project VR Healthcare Training?
In brief, it’s a classic project about exploring the possibility of training programs for next-generation. Our client, University of Pittsburgh, is looking forward to creating a safer, more reliable virtual world for training medical students to learn how to communicate with patients with empathy, identity sensitivity, and clinical information. Currently, they are hiring actors to play the patients for training use. But, actors are hard to schedule their time, and their responses sometimes may be inconsistent. Therefore, a VR solution is coming to our client’s vision. They hope to have an easy-to-go VR training program, which requires students to put on VR headsets and get into the immersive clinical simulation environment with virtual patients. Also, clients are looking forward to maintaining and iterating this project in the long term. Therefore, our primary goal is to explore pipelines and build prototypes, to ensure the scenario is flexible enough for extension in the future.
What are we going to do?
Since there are many similar projects for reference, we need more time to consume those pieces of information. With the client’s vital requirement, Virtual Reality is the way we are going to set up. Also, Artificial Intelligence is another expectation from clients. To be honest, those buzz words are fancy, and it would be great to have them both simultaneously. However, we know the difficulty of implementation more than the power of technology. For us, we want to build a project that could be reused and iterated, which genuinely impacts the world. To strike a balance between the client’s expectations and our wants, it would take a while for us to explore the perfect formula.