Kaixiang Cui

I'm Kaixiang Cui. During the AcrossRCA co-op course, I had a very special and meaningful co-op experience. As one of the four members of the group, I have invested a lot of time and energy in working with my peers on this course project. During my time in AcrossRCA, I met frequently with the team to exchange our ideas, which provided me with many opportunities to hone my ideas. We chose to use VR and AR as vehicles to explore helping people with dementia, and technologies like VR and AR which are foreign to each of us. Therefore, we learn and share experiences together and help each other. When it comes to a specific area of expertise, we have relevant tasks performed by members of the corresponding field. I showed many new design ideas for medical buildings, as well as cases of nursing villages for people with dementia that they had never been exposed to. The research on existing designs can be easily obtained through the Internet for students of all majors, but the views on future design can only be communicated with other majors, because it requires professional knowledge. Therefore, this part of the exchange brought me many gains, and I now have a real understanding of the attitude of other majors to the problem, the means to show the problem and the method of solving the problem. In projects that require building 3D models, I, as a professional student who often needs to build 3D models, is responsible for this part. During the design process, we tried ARtivive, Adobe Aero, Unreal Engine, Unity and other software. These software really gave me a lot of experience that I might possibly use in future designs. But the difference in professional skills also makes it impossible for us to distribute our work more evenly, in fact, most of the work is done by us together. But this did not cause us complications, on the contrary, we got along very well. Because we are not working as employees in a group, but together as students, we learn new skills and try untried areas. There is no such thing as 'you do this, and I finish that'. It's about accomplishing something together and learning the skills to accomplish that purpose all at the same time. So, I gained a lot of skills and insights in the process.