3-29-2026 Fantastic start

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/600785_0decd54c9af24048b1f65ff5047a62a0/720p/mp4/file.mp4

This week we did quite a bit of brainstorming! We liked the idea of developing in VR much more than AR, so we decided very early to work in VR. VR has an incredible amount of uses, and we decided tutorials on how to do certain things in real life would be an impactful project to work on, since many people learn a lot better by doing things themselves. We had a few ideas, including:

• How to tie a tie tutorial

• How to dance tutorial

• Self-defense/Boxing course

• Emergency situation simulation

What we decided

Eventually we settled on the self-defense course. One of our groupmates brought up how their original idea was an emergency situation, and self-defense was in line with this. Another groupmate has experience in boxing himself so he would be able to include some of his own experiences into the simulation. This idea had some major merits, including:

• Technical sophistication

  • We were thinking about adding some detection systems for checking the player's form and making sure they were throwing their punches correctly. We could make sure the player is sinking for balance by checking the height at any given time, and detect the hand distance to their face and making sure they aren't dropping their hands. We were also thinking about adding a calibration mode which would have the player measure their armspan and various other metrics to make sure we were getting their form correctly.

• Novelty

  • We think this idea is fairly novel! While there are many boxing courses online in VR, ours focuses more on self-defense than boxing techniques. Not many people know how to throw a punch, and not everyone that should know how to throw a punch is interested in boxing specifically.

• Social Impact

  • While this would add a good amount of value in the form of exercise, it would also add awareness to self-defense techniques. As stated earlier, not everyone knows how to throw a punch, so it would be good for people to have a simple and easy way to get into learning how. Not everyone has access to a gym, and even less people have access to a personal trainer, so this would be extremely helpful to have.

• XR Emphasis

  • Anyone can look up a tutorial to learn self-defense, but it is extremely helpful to have an environment to get feedback on your form as you go. Therefore, having a VR environment to do this in speaks for itself.

• Financial Sustainability

  • We had various ideas about this -- we could make the simulation itself cost money, we could add different courses that each cost something, or add cosmetics to the punching bag or fists that each cost money. Each of these ideas would likely add some form of financial sustainability.

Environment

For the environment, we had 3 ideas: A boxing ring, an outdoors environment, and a training gym. The gym or boxing ring would be for training, and then the outdoors environment would be for an aggressive encounter. We settled on implementing all three!

Development

After this, we got to work. We set up a boxing ring environment and made the hands into real physics objects that can interact with the environment, and added some forearm colliders so more than just the hand registers. Then, we added a simple bag in the room that falls when the player punches it.