Cultivating Curiosity & Encouraging Innovation with 3D Learning, featuring AltruTec’s Olivia Wenzel

Olivia Wenzel may be Julie’s youngest guest yet, but her youth hasn’t stopped her from launching a startup — AltruTec — or teaming with Julie on the VRARA’s Parent & Student Resource, or using VR to combat dementia.

Julie: Hello, everyone, my name is Julie Smithson and I am your XR for Learning podcast host. I look forward to bringing you insight into changing the way that we learn and teach using XR technologies, to explore, enhance, and individualize learning for everyone. Today, my special guest is Olivia Wenzel, a student and founder of AltruTec, developing video games for adults suffering from dementia. Thank you so much, Olivia, for joining me today on this podcast.

Olivia: Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Julie: It is so great to have somebody from the next generation join me. You happen to be the youngest one of my guests. So thank you so much for being here. And I'm really excited to be able to share with everyone some of the works that we've been doing, since you and I have been working together for the last year and a half on the student committee with the Virtual and Augmented Reality Association, developing and building out resources for everyone. So first of all, I'd like to give you a chance to introduce yourself and then we'll step into a little bit about some of the work that we're doing.

Olivia: Absolutely. I just graduated from high school and I'm headed to Harvard this fall. I'm interested in studying at the intersection of health and technology. So I'm thinking computer science and neuroscience, or computer science and psychology. I'm not quite sure yet. I have a startup called AltruTec. I'm really interested in improving the quality of life for older adults. But perhaps what's most relevant to today's discussion is my co-leadership of the student committee with Julie. I have the great pleasure of leading this committee of students, parents, and VR and AR industry professionals with Julie, an amazing mentor. We aim to support parents, students, and schools in adopting immersive technologies and 3D learning. But let me take a step back and answer your question about how I got involved. My interest in virtual and augmented reality is actually heavily tied to AltruTec. I have a family history of dementia, and when I first started exploring other approaches to improve people with dementia's quality of life, I ended up coming across several virtual reality applications. Long story short, they were using this immersive platform to deliver non-pharmacological therapy, such as reminiscence and music therapy. I found the mediums to be extremely promising. The early research that was coming out was so exciting. And so I ended up reaching out to some universities and companies in the area, because I really didn't have any background in technology or virtual/augmented reality, especially at the time. And I met someone in Cleveland named Reynaldo Zabala, who was involved in the VR/AR Association. And after some further correspondences, he helped me develop my ideas some more. I ended up being introduced to the committee, and soon I was heading it up. [laughs]

Julie: [laughs] Which has been a long time coming for us, to finally put a project together that we can work on. And I think it was over a good six, seven months period of time of us just talking to each other, and then figuring out what kind of mission could we work on together, that could give back to the community. And that's where we came up with the parent and student resource.

Olivia: Yes, yep.

Julie: So, yeah, we came up with a few ideas on how to do this, but this was kind of a zeroed-in project, and I