SECONDARY school students from Limerick have been using their impressive skills in virtual reality technology to place themselves in the midst of the grizzly World War One battlefield.
Zack Bannon Griffin and Luke O’Loughlin-Byrne from Ardscoil Rís secondary school in Limerick City won the regional heat of the TUS Moylish SciFest with their entry, ‘The Archive – Using VR to assist in Junior Cycle study’.
The creative student’s project aims at aiding students studying for their Junior Cert through the use of virtual reality – placing the user into several historical scenes and allowing them to experience these events first hand.
For the project, the computer-savvy trio looked at World War One as their subject matter, using the Godot video game engine and the GDScript coding language.
Outlining the hard work that went into their project, the students said: “To create the scenes of history, we will be taking models off a website called Sketchfab and putting them together in a scene using a program called Blender. We are using an AI narrator to narrate these scenes so we don’t have to hire voice actors.”
Winners from each regional STEM fair will compete in a national final and after that, those winners will compete at the International Science and Engineering Fair in the USA along with the Long Night of Science in Berlin.
Over 15,000 students take part in SciFest every year, with the help of funding from the Department of Education, Research Ireland, Intel Ireland, Boston Scientific, EirGrid, and Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals.
