Pro­ject Group: Nu­tri­tion edu­ca­tion and de­cision sup­port for per­son­al­ized, sus­tain­able and healthy nu­tri­tion through XR (NutriXR)

Motivation

Children and young people in particular face challenges in everyday life when it comes to aspects of healthy and sustainable nutrition. Empirical studies pointing to the importance of social context show that school nutrition has positive effects on nutritional status, well-being and social cohesion. In order to make it easier for children and young people to make healthy and sustainable choices in everyday life, skills and advantageous patterns of behavior and decision-making must be acquired that go beyond easily accessible consumer information. Nutrition education and decision-making support for personalized, sustainable and healthy nutrition can make a particularly relevant contribution in this context, because approaches tailored to the individual are more likely to result in health-promoting diets. The proposed project therefore takes up different nutritional environments using innovative interaction technologies such Augmented (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR), makes currently practiced decision-making incentives tangible in settings, encourages a critical analysis and allows the playful development of alternative courses of action as an individual or in a peer group. Thus, the project uses relevant nutritional environments (supermarket, restaurants, school canteen, eating with friends/family, etc.) as framework settings to convey and deepen nutritional knowledge using AR and VR, to uncover possible conflicting goals and to initiate action skills for a healthier and more sustainable diet.

Task

  • Literature research on the topics AR, VR, Gamification, Healthy & Sustaibale Nutrition
  • Conceptualization and Design of XR apps supporting healthy and sustainable nutrition
  • Prototypical Implementation of of XR apps supporting healthy and sustainable nutrition
  • Experiment-based evaluation of the implemented approach

Requirements

  • Sound programming skills in an object-oriented language, e.g. Java, C#
  • 3D Programming, experience with Unity Engine
  • Motivation to work in an agile team, self-organize yourself, and be creative!

Course information

  • The project group will be conducted in English (unless all participants agree with the German language)
  • Computer science (CS) and engineering (CE) students are welcome
      - CS students get 20 ECTS, CE students 18 ECTS
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