An experience for VR to tackle awareness of food insecurity problems that are overlooked in schools and borderline poverty. Built and designed with 2 other classmates under a new elective at UF's CISE Program: VR For Social Good.

What is Food Insecurity?

VR For Social Good is an elective at University of Florida that recently came to life under Dr. Benjamin Lok. The goal of the class is to teach students how to work under Agile philosophy in 2 week scrums to develop VR experiences to tackle a social good topic in less than a semester. To preface the topic my team chose, food insecurity describes a household's inability to provide enough food for every person to live an active and healthy life (defined by Feeding America).

Awareness through immersion

We were unrestricted as to what VR platform we could develop for, and since we didn't have Oculus Rift development software skills at all, we naturally leaned towards learning Oculus Rift and desktop VR in order to gain access to a more immersive experience using the ergonomic and more natural hand controllers, the Touch Controllers.

After a careful dive into research and news about food insecurity, the team and I decided the most appropriate way to bring about awareness of food insecurity was to let users experience one of the hungry students and experience their daily life and how hunger disrupts what one would deem as normal, as well as experience a student who doesn't have food insecurity in order to establish a contrast. We would then split a student's day in school into "levels" and attempt to show direct cause and effect based on these experiences:

• Morning: Insufficient breakfast leads to poor focus during lectures.
• Afternoon: Insufficient lunch leads to poor reaction times during gym class.
• Night: Insufficient dinner leads to poor ability to do household chores.

Then we would simply have to design methods on how to simulate poor focus, poor reaction, and poor ability on the user when it came to those events for the character with food insecurity. After they finish a day in the life with the first character, the user would then meet the second day with the second character, who wouldn't be hindered when it came to those events. By doing this, it would be feasible for the user to draw direct cause and effect correlations that food fuels all that we do.