New Virtual Reality App Shows NYU Students What It’s Like to Have Normal College Experience
With its urban landscape, lack of a definitive campus, and sparse sense of community, some NYU students complain that they wanted something different from their higher education. Thus, in an effort to stem the perception that NYU doesn’t offer the “typical college experience” that many students expect when they leave high school, researchers at the Tandon School of Engineering have developed a virtual reality application that synthesizes what it’d be like to attend a large, party-centric state school.
“I never get laid and nobody likes me,” complained Danny Pitts, a fetid and unkempt junior living in a lavish studio apartment in Greenwich Village, as he sipped a Mountain Dew. “But when I used the app and put the headset on, I rushed ΣΠΛ, railed some adderall, and fucked sixteen girls in one night, right as the football team won the BCS national championship game. It was awesome.”
Scientists at Tandon explained that the advent of Facebook and other social media platforms caused NYU students to compare their college experiences to their friends’ from back home. “They see their friends chugging beer on the campus green and vandalizing personal property for fun and they ask, ‘What if?’ We’re trying to relieve this anxiety by creating an artificial environment that students can traverse in real time.”
Despite the app’s good intentions, many raised the question of how the programmers knew this prototypical college experience well enough to create a realistic replica. “Oh, most people don’t know too much about the lifestyle of someone in the engineering school,” said Jason Lai, lead developer. “But this is pretty much every night for us.”