Interdisciplinary project grows with students' experience

Getting an interdisciplinary experience in undergraduate is incredibly important and we know that because the companies that we partner with have said they need students to work with other students outside of their own major because that's what their team will look like when they work for this company. So SMART for our capstone project stands for Spatially Managed Augmented Residential Toolkit. What we're experimenting with this semester is using augmented reality, namely the Apple Vision Pro to try to control your smart home devices and set them up. Currently the control systems that we have implemented are tap gestures, where you look at a device, you tap it, and let's say it's a light, it turns on, if it's a curtain it opens. So eventually we want the gestures to be optimized as much as possible, such that we can have gestures like this opening curtains, pinching to do toggling on and off for the light bulbs, and we have a few gestures of our own to change the colors. but also eventually we intend to merge this all into smaller form classes and be able to do all this in a way that doesn't feel clunky or very futuristic. So the SMART team is unique because it started out in the interdisciplinary programs as an idea that came out of the first year engineering class. The students loved the idea so much they wanted to continue working on it in the interdisciplinary projects class focused on sophomores and juniors. It went very well so they brought it into their capstone course their senior year to really improve and advance the technology of the idea. We call that a vertically integrated opportunity for students to be able to stay in the same project for their whole academic career at Virginia Tech.