VR Showcase 2025 at Vanderbilt University

And the winner groups are "Arrowgeddon" and "Lost in Babel"...

At the end of the Fall 2025 semester, students from the Projects in Virtual Reality Design (CS-4249/5249) course participated in the departmental final project showcase alongside peers from other project-based courses, including Autonomous Vehicles and Traffic, Data-Centric AI and Mining, and Formal Methods: Safe and Trustworthy AI. I was thrilled that the project Arrowgeddon won first prize and Lost in Babel received second prize.

Arrowgeddon was a 3D multiplayer archery game in which players worked together in a virtual environment to aim and shoot arrows at targets and each other. The most impressive part of the project was its enhanced haptic feedback system. To make arrow hits feel more realistic, the students built a separate mobile app and connected it to the VR game through an external server. As a result, when an arrow struck a player’s body, the mobile device in their pocket vibrated to simulate the impact, making the experience more immersive. In contrast, Lost in Babel was a maze-based game in which players had to interact with virtual avatars to collect objects, such as keys, and escape. What made this project especially interesting was its language-based interaction system. Because the avatars spoke different languages instead of English, players had to figure out how to communicate with them effectively. To support this, the students developed a real-time translation system using machine learning and generative AI that translated between the players’ spoken language and the avatars’ language. This made the game more engaging by turning communication itself into part of the challenge.

As the Graduate Teaching Assistant for the course, I was proud to mentor team Arrowgeddon as they refined several key gameplay mechanics. I also advised them on how to present their project to the judges not simply as a game, but as a research-driven effort aimed at addressing real-world problems. My dear friend Frank played a key role in mentoring the Lost in Babel team, especially in helping them implement the real-time translation system and the dialogue generation between players and virtual avatars, which closely aligned with his PhD research. My other dear friend Sodabe supported both teams, as well as several others, by providing valuable feedback throughout the semester, which helped the students improve their projects iteratively.