Pitt researchers develop game about viruses

That was delegated to outof-state students who he mostly communicated with through video calls or Slack, a cloud-based collaboration tool that works like a kind of instant message or group chat. To create a 360-degree virtual reality app, Mr. Gregg and Mr. Shoemaker leveraged help from students at Full Sail University in Winter Park, Fla. The university’s aim is to provide training for work in entertainment, media, arts and technology.

“I was making sure what they did was both fun from a gaming perspective, but also somewhat biologically relevant,” Mr. Gregg said with a laugh, recalling a time he had to take leadership of the team’s progress.

“There were some situations where they were like, ‘Can we have this huge virus and shoot it with proteins?’ and I’m like, ‘That’s not really how it works,’ ” he said.

Besides collaboration, debugging the game presented learning curves for the two engineers.

The game took three months of total development, but the debugging process took another two months, Mr. Shoemaker said, noting there are certain parameters an app must meet to be included in the Google Play market or Apple’s App Store.

Vir-ed still is not available in the App Store, but it should be in the coming weeks, Mr. Shoemaker said. The team is slightly behind on that iteration of the app.

“When you develop an application for the Apple store, it has to be developed on a Mac,” Mr. Shoemaker said. His team initially used PCs and more or less had to do all the work twice.

Improve to sell

Vir-ed is free. Despite all of the hard work, Mr. Shoemaker said it’s highly unlikely this app, or any future ones his lab develops, will be monetized. That’s because of his affiliation with Pitt.

The game uses a free software license called the MIT license, which means anyone has the right to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense or sell copies of the software. Under the license, Shoemaker Immunosystems Lab still technically owns the intellectual property for Vired, but any developer can build on top of it.

“If you can find a way to expand the product and make it marketable, you are allowed to sell it as well,” Mr. Shoemaker said. “You’d have to recognize the original team, though.”

Mr. Shoemaker said he didn’t exactly receive any grants for the project, but he did receive an internal “grant” from the chemical engineering department.

He added that his lab has a few grant applications out with National Science Foundation to continue promoting these types of games in education. If funded, it would encourage him to continue creating games for free distribution.

The next game will begin development in January, and Mr. Shoemaker suspects he will have a different graduate studenthelp this time.

“I want to give each of them the opportunity to try this as an exercise in management, because that’s something you don’t generally get in graduate school, which is really unfortunate,” Mr. Shoemaker said.

“That’s disappointing because if you get a Ph.D., a lot of times you end up managing,” he continued. “There’s learning on all sides of the problem.”