CareXR

McGillXR's largest hackathon — 105 participants built 23 VR and AR projects for child and family wellbeing over a weekend at the Shriners Hospitals for Children.

CareXR was a creative, beginner-friendly space for students of all backgrounds to build innovative VR and AR tools addressing challenges that impact child and family wellbeing. Held at the Shriners Hospitals for Children in Montreal, it became the largest hackathon McGillXR has run. From 232 applications, 150 students were accepted and 105 took part, forming 23 teams over 48 hours, supported by 14 mentors, 10 judges and 6 guest speakers. Five free pre-hackathon workshops and events got participants building beforehand.

Tracks

Teams worked across healthcare, education and society:

• Healthcare — immersive tools that improve care for children and families, from pain management therapies to training for healthcare providers to helping children understand their own treatment
• Education — immersive learning for children and caregivers
• Society — environments that build understanding, including experiences that convey what living with a disability is like

Alongside the overall prizes, two sponsor tracks ran: building for Snap Spectacles, and cooperative brain health, set by the Centre for Digital Brain Therapies. Participants competed for over $5,000 in prize money.

Winners

Twenty-three projects were submitted, spanning animal-assisted intervention, memory and recall, sensory tools and rehabilitation.

• First place — Shooting Star turns rehabilitation into a space adventure, with personalized tracking and visualized data to support clinical assessment.
• Second place — Before You Go lets children step into the doctor’s shoes in VR, so nothing is a surprise when it is their turn.
• Third place — RecallAR makes AR glasses a real-time cognitive companion, helping people recognize loved ones and find their way around familiar places.
• Cooperative brain health track — first, CareXtRa Hard, which also took the Popular Choice Award, for making upcoming procedures less frightening; second, InSight, which detects emotion in speech for autistic users.
• Snap Spectacles track — first, Mindstep, which helps occupational therapists and patients with executive dysfunction track progress through rehabilitation, with SoftEyes, a real-time social companion for conversations, and RecallAR also winning the track.
• Best Beginner Hack — Dreamopia, an AR storyteller that brings children’s stories to life with 3D animals.

Snappy won the clip contest and Colour Me Curious the mid-hack challenge.

The full gallery is on Devpost.