NYU Shanghai students Sean Kelly and Sam Shi want to use the potential of VR to increase access to information. Over the weekend at the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon in New York, the duo initially looked into assisting students studying brain surgery but they switched their target and developed Teach-U: VR — a platform that lets students, and particularly young people, learn music.
Kelly and Shi used Google’s Cardboard VR device with an infrared sensor from PMD added to enable hand gestures into the virtual environment. So beyond merely observing via Cardboard, users can reach out, touch and play their virtual instruments. They also adapted the setup — which was developed using Unity, Carnival’s SDK and good ol’ fashioned tinkering — to allow two concurrent users in the same virtual reality space: the teacher and the student.
Teach-U: VR uses virtual reality to let anyone learn piano or drums [TechCrunch]