ICDS News

Above Patrick Dudas, associate director of the Penn State Center for Immersive Experiences, stands with Penn State computer science students Chaoping Li, Shamak Vikash Agarwal, Lok Yiu Wu, Kevin Cai, and Nichaolas Ta. The students participated in this year's ICDS challenge as part of HackPSU.

Students take on ICDS challenge at HackPSU

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — A team of five computer science students tackled a challenge presented by the Penn State Institute for Computational and Data Sciences (ICDS) at this year’s HackPSU event. 

The 24-hour challenge tasked students to create a light detection and ranging (LIDAR)-inspired tool or application that enables users to contextualize digital twin creation and 3D modeling of a real-world space. 

“The team approached the challenge in a creative way, and I am really happy with how it turned out,” said Patrick Dudas, associate director for the Penn State Center for Immersive Experiences who coordinated the ICDS challenge.  

The students created an iPhone gaming app using Swift — an iOS-based programming language — titled “Lidarcade,” which was created with the intention of use by doctors, as well as stroke patients who need physical and cognitive rehabilitation care. 

“We made an app that uses the iPhone camera to live scan rooms and generate images of targets for users to tap away… It’s similar to ‘Space Invaders’,” said Chaoping Li, freshman computer science major, who competed in the challenge. “We went into this not knowing much about the different programming languages, but we not only took on the ICDS challenge, but we also faced learning more about the program Swift and augmented reality libraries.” 

Lidarcade allows patients to log in, scan their surroundings and attempt to tap away the targets for points of accuracy. The application — created only for use in the hack-a-thon —also allowed doctors to log in separately to view how their patients were scoring and determine which patients might need more rehabilitation care depending on their accuracy score. 

“One of our goals was thinking about getting the patients up and moving during their treatment,” said Shamak Vikash Agarwal, sophomore computer science major. “When someone has a stroke, they sometimes lose the ability to move their muscles and need to regain their strength back. This app would get the patients moving their hands and enhance their cognitive function.” 

The students presented a demonstration of the app to the team at ICDS and answered questions about their process in completing the challenge.  

The team, which also includes Kevin Cai, junior computer science major, Lok Yiu Wu, senior computer science major, and Nicholas Ta, sophomore computer science major, noted that they learned more than just technical skills they can take with them into the industry. 

“This was a unique experience,” Cai said. “We worked together as a team and got a real taste of what the real work experience is like. We were contributing to a greater good through this project.” 

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