A realtime VR vs Mobile multiplayer game utilizing JavaScript, PhaserJS, and C#.

Perfect for the classroom, one player wearing an Oculus Rift headset represents a white blood cell within a blood vessel fighting to protect a human body from becoming ill. Players on their mobile devices can take on the roles of either powerful antibodies or troublesome bacteria and can help (or hurt) the VR player's blood cell by manipulating remotely what's happening inside the VR experience.

• node ⇨ [LICENSE]
• phaser ⇨ [LICENSE]
• express ⇨ [LICENSE]
• socket.io ⇨ [LICENSE]
• Unity Free, v2017.1.2f1 ⇨ [LICENSE]
• Oculus Utilities for Unity ⇨ [LICENSE]

A collaborative experience of one VR user and screen users anywhere. The VR is connected to screens, phones or any browser device. The educational game offers collaborative learning about various topics.

Today's first ‘game’ combines biology, synchronized breathing and interfaces, and interplay. The VR user plays a white blood cell inside a blood vessel to fight off ‘bad’ bacteria. The screen users can team up as blood cells, breathe to energize the VR user’s entity – or become bacterial agents to disrupt the smooth blood flow.

Gamified and embodied educational experiences and breathing techniques are scientifically suggested to improve health and productivity. Gamification (Johnson et al., 2016) can have a positive impact in health and wellbeing. Collaborative learning (Laal and Ghodsi, 2011) results in greater productivity, more caring and committed relationships, greater psychological health, social competence, and self esteem. Simple breathing techniques have shown to fight injection of e.coli bacteria within minutes (Kox et al., 2014).

Virtual reality can be a solitary experience and its classroom or educational value limited. Excessive screen-based usage has been linked to less attention span. Studies conclude poor academic performance can be predicted by higher levels of smartphone use (Beland and Murphy, 2014) and electronic media usage (Junco and Cotten, 2012). Regular engagement with digital media technologies can lead to shorter attention spans (e.g., Egan, 2016)

Symbio offers a gamified, collaborative and educational experience beyond the current limitations of the applied mediums. The program dynamics are easily expandable to new mediums such as AR, explore a variety of educational topics and integrate collective biofeedback for future biotechnology.

Technology: VR experience built in Unity or Unreal Socket.io to exchange packets with Node server. Node JS server hosted on AWS and distributed via bit.ly shortened link. Express.js and Phaser.js for 2d Interface Socket.io backend