Sofia's Projects

Polar Collapse

A hostile alien planet is on a collision course with Earth, and the last hope is to destroy its core before the catastrophe occurs! With the power of magnets on your side, you are the chosen one for this task. Defeat enemies and bosses to make your way to the planet's core, where you will need to make the tough decision.

Technical details

Polar Collapse is programmed in C# using the MonoGame framework.

Download our game on itch.io!

GameLab 2026

This year marked the 20th anniversary of the GameLab course at ETH. To celebrate, every team was randomly assigned a theme from the past editions. Our team got the theme of "Attracion". We brainstormed for a bit and that's how Polar Collapse was born!

Unfortunately, we didn't win the competition at the end of the semester. However, everyone who tried our game told us they had lots of fun (and that they regret not voting for us at the contest!), so that's enough of a win for me hehe

Here's the link to the award ceremony livestream!

About the project

Our group of 4 people was tasked with building a VR experience around a fully animated and textured human avatar placed in an immersive virtual environment. This involved integrating a parametric avatar with motion sequences, giving it a realistic appearance through textures, shading, and lighting, and letting users interact with it via VR controllers. We used SMPL-X as the underlying body model, TADA for texture and shading generation, and the AIST++ dataset for the dance motions.

Why a rhythm game?

We built Dance Dance VRevolution, a VR rhythm game inspired by the classic Dance Dance Revolution, as a fun and interactive way to contextualise our avatar implementation. Players time inputs to falling notes using controller to hit virtual drums, adding a natural VR interaction layer. In the background, our avatar dances along to the music, bringing the technical work to life in an entertaining way.

A dedicated Sandbox mode also lets users interact directly with the avatar, triggering and controlling its animations in real time.

Technical details

Hardware: Meta Quest 3
Software: Python, Unity, Meta SDK, OpenXR
Technologies: SMPL-X, AIST++, TADA
[1] Relightable Gaussian Codec Avatars, Saito et al., CVPR 2024
[2] Expressive Body Capture:3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image (SMPL-X)

On Friday, 28 June, 2024 I succesfully defended my Bachelor's thesis on free will with a grade of 10 out of 10!

I don't claim to solve the free will debate (that's not for me to do!), but it was super interesting to see it from a computational perspective.

My friend Riccardo Piras made the donkey (Buridan's ass) image that is featured on my poster.

Features include Perlin noise textures, image texturing, optimization, custom obj loader.

Take a look at the final rendered image!

Sketch made by Riccardo Piras.

Here's a sketch I made in Blender.

Assets used

• Kyurem model by JacobTan
• Crystal Column by Jonathan Millhauser
• Crystals by AlexOlTroi
• Qwilfish by Ploaj
• Fallen Land by in tou me

Our solution to the "PainMgmt: Safer Solutions" Challenge by Tietoevry at the 2023 Junction Hackathon.

Fun fact: we named it Finn becuase morphine, dolphin, Finn... lol

Check out the handshake promotional videos below.

The first video is the official presentation video we have shown at the end of the project. I made the other videos for fun with random stock footage and songs I liked, to try and create some identity for the app.

But I have no idea how marketing works lol