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Students' Hackathons in Serious Gaming & VR


Students are fresh, bright, creative, and might see challenges from a different perspective. They are an important part of tomorrow’s workforce and the talents we aim to attract. At Roche, we focus on a close collaboration with academia and within this scope, we were delighted to participate in two projects with the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts (HSLU).
 
The project weeks from the IT department of HSLU in September comprised of two kinds of Hackathons in the area of Serious Gaming and Virtual Reality (VR).

Serious Gaming
For the project week in Serious Gaming our team from Global Customer Support challenged the young talents to develop a gamified approach for one of our devices. How can training be more interactive, fun but also educational? The students’ approaches ranged from virtual Cat-Games, to simulating a doctor’s environment up to the classic board game.  We were stunned by the students’ creativity, dedication and passion.

Getting inspired by Generation Z
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It was extremely inspiring for us to experience and get to know the upcoming new generation
Maya
Leader of Global Learning Content Design & Development

UX & VR

In the project week with our teams from UX and R&D Software Development the Hackathon focused on Virtual Reality. The groups were given various challenges on how to integrate VR into the healthcare environment. From creating a lab area dominated by zombies, to setting up a 3D dashboard virtually, which could be “touched”, the students could bring in their creativity. “The results I received were of course not "production ready", but every team had great ideas worth looking into.”, concluded Bernhard from UX. Also Roman, SW department leader, was happy with the result of the students for his challenge of “Augmented instrument information” and sees great potential to use the approach for simulation purposes and also further development.

The development of science and technology is at the heart of Roche’s business efforts. Collaboration with Universities is key to be at the pulse of new talents, innovation and digitalization - in order to do what patients need next! The events took place in compliance with strict COVID-19 measures.
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