Beating out ideas from across the country, a UT Dallas researcher is taking VR into the classroom after taking home the top prize from Tech Titans’ 5G Grand Challenge.
The local technology forum put out a call to startups and entrepreneurs in summer, seeking ideas that leverage 5G technology to help enable contact-free connections between people and organizations amid the pandemic. And a panel of judges that included local serial entrepreneur Mark Cuban and AT&T Consumer CEO Thaddeus Arroyo named Marjorie Zielke, director of UTD’s Center for Simulation and Synthetic Humans, the winner last week.
“This proposal hits all of the pillars of this 5G competition,” Arroyo said in a statement. “It addresses a need and has the potential for significant societal impact.”
Along with mentorship and accessing to networking for potential funding and partnerships through Tech Titan’s Innovation Collider, the organization said Zielke is eligible for up to $20,000 in awards from telecom companies including Nokia, Ericsson and AT&T.
She will also be recognized at the upcoming Tech Titans Awards on October 23.
Zielke’s project, Emergent Virtual Teacher Platform, uses sensor and IoT data, as well as 5G tech to create virtual reality teachers. Her team at UT Dallas are also using the technology to create hologram teachers. Tech Titans said part of the reason EVTP was chosen as the winner was its potential to help create a better socio-emotional connection between students and teachers during distance learning, especially in lower-income and rural areas.
“Our goal is to eventually create standalone, life like holograms of virtual teachers. We see a future society of synthetic and real humans working together,” Zielke said in a statement.
The EVTP project developed out of Zielke’s work at UTD’s Center for Modeling and Simulation/Virtual Humans and Synthetic Societies Lab. In February, her team received a $750,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to create a VR training platform that used the Microsoft HoloLens to educate med students on developing a patient-physician relationship.
While no details or dates have been released, the Tech Titans Innovation Collider said it plans to host a similar version of the 5G Grand Challenge in the future.
“Throughout my research I have focused on 5G,” Zielke said. “The gaps are very apparent, with school districts scrambling for solutions and parents becoming full-time teachers. Students with special needs have been particularly challenged.”
