The Maze: Scarecrow's Revenge, Agricultural Education and Outreach Through Game Development

Extended reality is known as a technical term encompassing augmented, virtual, and mixed reality. It is a niche technology domain that finds its way through virtually every sector, from academia to businesses and industries. Its success is due to the level of immersion it brings to the user. The COVID-19 pandemic, with its unprecedented consequences and lockdowns, amplified the advantages of immersive education and learning through extended reality technology. The technology extension to smartphones and Web pages has enabled its accessibility to a level expected to grow beyond the pandemic era. Due to the rural locations of farms, agriculture is a great candidate where extended reality technology can strengthen its reach to a more enormous population for education, promotion, and outreach. The current study, at the intersection of the agricultural sector and extended reality technology, presents the development of a three-dimensional interactive game to promote the Tennessee corn. The game is developed in Unity engine (version 2020.3.12). It is a single-player, first-person perspective game, where the arrow keys make a farmer character navigate turns and obstacles within a corn maze. Scarecrows will appear over the game course and force the player to answer a trivia question about corn production and usage. The player moves forward unchanged with correct answers to the trivia questions;however, the player will lose a life from their five-life total with an incorrect answer. The goal is to escape the maze by correctly answering trivia questions, navigating the maze, and finding bonus lives scattered throughout. The study discusses the design process of player movements, camera movements, objects interactions, and other game-play mechanics. With our target audience primarily set to middle school students in rural areas, the game was successfully developed and released as a Web-based game (https://bar.rancsgroup.com/TheMaze/ ). Our current plan is to extend the game with optional difficulty levels as well as release smartphones applications through major platforms. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

AutonoMop, Automating Mundane Work in the COVID-19 Era

While the COVID-19 pandemic has had devastating impacts in our lives, It rendered critical needs for intelligent automation in fields such as janitorial works. The cleaning task is an inseparable element of various sectors ranging from residential to hospitals and industrial buildings. The current study introduces a newly developed design based on the recent technology called AutonoMop, an eco-friendly autonomous robot. The proposed AutonoMop technology addresses the multifaceted problem of autonomous surface cleaning and mopping. AutonoMop advances beyond the existing cleaning technology by embodying an eco-friendly element for water filtering and serving multi-functionalities (vacuuming, washing, mopping). The first AutonoMop prototype consists of three modules working in unison to operate, an electronic module, a process module, and a body module. With design objectives, such as relatively compact size and weight on an industrial scale, in mind, the prototype of the AutonoMop robot delivered promising performance. © 2022 IEEE.

Grand Challenges in Bio-Nanotechnology to Manage the COVID-19 Pandemic

The outbreak of the COVID-19, a human beta coronavirus severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS-CoV-2) virus infection, has severely affected the world. The pandemic is not yet in full control due to a lack of rapid diagnostics and therapeutics. This viral infection continues to result in a steadily increasing loss of life, and it has also emerged as a significant global socio-economic burden. As result, it has united many countries for the purposes of exploring molecular biology, biomedical science, and the nanotechnology to manage COVID-19 successfully. As of today, the current priority is to investigate novel therapies of high efficacy and smart diagnostics tools for early-stage disease diagnostics along with monitoring. Keeping these advancement and challenges in mind, this perspective article mainly highlights the contribution and possibilities of bio-nanotechnology to manage the COVID-19 pandemic, even in a personalized manner. Authors also pinpoint barriers to the utilization of current bio-nanotechnology to facilitate a more accurate understanding of COVID-19 and to lead the way toward personalized health and wellness. Furthermore, we follow the discussion of the features and challenges in upcoming bio-nanotechnology approaches for COVID-19 management. In this progressive option report, bio-nanotechnologies that have been enriched with the power of artificial intelligence and optimized at the personalized level have been found to lead to a sustainable treatment and cure strategy at a global population scale. Copyright © 2020 Paliwal, Sargolzaei, Bhardwaj, Bhardwaj, Dixit and Kaushik.