NYU Tandon’s VR app to debut at SXSW
Tandon Aims to Make Blood Cells More Fun than Bloodshed in Video Games
As South by Southwest’s (SXSW) annual Gaming Expo opens next week, big-name game companies will be vying for attention for their newest releases alongside a virtual reality app that can make bone and capillary-forming endothelial cells as exciting as racing and shooting. It should come as no surprise that the app is the work of university students and faculty — the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, to be specific. Their goal: to attract future engineers and scientists as hyped on STEM as they are.
High school graduates admitted to the class of 2021 at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering will find a 3D cardboard viewer in their acceptance packages that will take them on a journey to a microscopic, intracellular world — a virtual reality (VR) game environment where they can watch cells communicate using chemical signals.
NYU Tandon will debut the experience, called Tandon Labs, at the SXSW Gaming Expo, Thursday, March 16 to Saturday, March 18. NYU Tandon is the only school invited to showcase a VR game that is being used as an admissions tool, but its Tandon Labs is available to all as a free download for Android and Apple.
The journey is an immersion — literally — into the research of Assistant Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Alesha B. Castillo. Users visit her Laboratory for Mechanobiology and Regenerative Medicine, where they are virtually dropped through a microscope’s eyepiece to the interstice between bone and capillary-forming endothelial cells. There they will enjoy a colorful close-up view of the process by which bone cells use paracrine signals to enjoin capillary endothelial cells to commence angiogenesis — the formation of new blood vessels.