Five college students from France who interned at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock’s Emerging Analytics Center have created a 3D virtual tour of the UA Little Rock campus as well as augmented reality games to entertain children at Arkansas Children’s Hospital. 

The Emerging Analytics Center, led by Director Dr. Carolina Cruz-Neira, has an internship exchange program with the University of Poitiers in France. The five students interned at the Emerging Analytics Center from March 27 to June 17.

“We had the opportunity to do our internship abroad, so we can discover visualization, virtual reality, and learn more about English,” said intern Sebastien Four. “We have a chance to see new technologies that aren’t on the markets yet. We have learned lots, and we discovered a new culture and new people. This is a great opportunity for us to work here for three months.”

Four and Lea Poignant spent their internship creating a 3D virtual tour of campus that can be viewed via Google Cardboard, a low-cost virtual reality viewer for smartphones.

“We had to think about a way for students to visit the campus from just a map and how students can really experience this campus from a 3D map,” Four said. “Hopefully, one day it will be an app on the app store and prospective students can use it. The skills that we learned here will be great for our resume for future jobs and school.”

The second intern team, Pauline Rouillon and Julie Couture, worked on the creation of three virtual and augmented reality games in development for use at Arkansas Children’s Hospital.

The plan is for the individual/multiplayer games to be available on a cell phone app that can be accessed from waiting rooms and patient rooms, so that kids in the hospital can play games together virtually, even if they cannot meet physically.

The fifth and final intern, Antoine Guillard, used the game development platform Unity to develop ways to more easily visualize big data. He created a 3D visualization of the factors involved in the World Happiness Report, an annual publication of the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network that contains rankings of national happiness.

In the upper right photo, intern Lea Poignant demonstrates a 360-degree virtual tour of the UA Little Rock campus. Photo by Ben Krain/UA Little Rock Communications.