Cultoure: A WebVR platform to connect immigrants to their new country

ColToure is a Web VR app that allows refugee children to get immersed in a new culture before they arrive there through an interactive room-like scenario where he/she is able to meet native kids. That way, we believe he/she'd be able to reduce the stress related to not only their political situation but in a more practical manner, the moving process itself.In more detail, the app has 2 environments: One that replicates the room of a child from Syria and the other a child from the United States. The objects in both are interactive: A pop-up appears with that object's name in Arabic or English. When they look away and look back, the word appear translated to the other language.

If you want to try it by yourself, the syria's child room can be accessed here (if it doesn't load right away, give it a few seconds. They're both hosted at Heroku and it takes sometime for the instances to load):https://usroom.herokuapp.com/syria.html

and the US room can be found here:https://usroom.herokuapp.com/basic.html

Reality, Virtually is an AR/VR hackathon hosted by the MIT Media Lab. In 2017 I was happy to be selected (In 2016, their acceptance ratio was 350/1000+) and go visit one of the places I admire the most: the MIT Media Lab. Me and Johan Ospina were the developers in the team, and since both of us had some experience with Javascript, we decided to go with that. We used Node/Express for the backend and Aframe to develop the interactive WebVR. Interaction between users is provided by Socket.io, and the app support up to 6 children playing simultaneously. The code is available at https://github.com/Reality-Virtually-Hackathon/LeapMind and more information on the project can be found here

Thank you for reading,
Teo.