A team of UA Little Rock students is trying to promote a safer work environment with the introduction of “Leap into Safety,” an affordable virtual reality safety simulator designed to make the operators more adept at operating powered equipment safely. 

The team includes Trenton Burroughs, information science major, and Denver Ellis, computer science major, as well as web design students Ryan Hood and Sunny Singh.

For their efforts, the students won first place in the Best Hardware Hack category at the CrimsonHacks competition March 23-24 at the University of Alabama. Each team member won an Elegoo Super Starter Kit, which includes Arduinos, sensors, motors, and other fun programmable hardware.

During CrimsonHacks, more than 250 students participated in a 24-hour hackathon to create technology to solve real world problems. UA Little Rock’s team created “Leap into Safety” by using the Leap Motion Sensor to track hand movements and integrate them into the Unity game engine, which allows users to interact with objects in a virtual environment in real time.

The team demonstrated how their technology could be used in safety simulations for welding and those who work with heavy equipment. The program is affordable, accessible, and easy to setup and use.

In the future, the team would like to integrate “Leap Into Safety” with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to ensure more workers can easily use the program for safety simulations. The end result will be more highly trained and safer employees who experience less injuries due to occupational machines.