On the first day of the Imagine Cup in Seattle, competing teams are showing serious commitment to producing truly interesting, useful and just plain cool projects using Microsoft’s software and services suite.

Here’s a selection of some of the presentations I’ve seen today.

VRMotion

The German team, competing under the “World Citizenship” category, introduced their project called VRMotion, which uses the Leap Motion controller to help stroke patients rehabilitate themselves with mini-games that help to improve their motor skills. The genius of VRMotion is that the two-person team has opened it to therapists, who are able to create their own unique and patient-specific exercises.

BoneyCare

Team BoneyCare from China, meanwhile, who are also competing in the World Citizenship category, has developed a speech therapy application that they say can help people who stutter by measuring speech patterns and applying data analysis to it for the purposes of feedback, with the help of the Azure cloud. The team told the judges that 72 out of the 100 patients they’ve used to beta test it so far reported improvements in their stuttering after just 5 weeks of use.

HexWorld & Apollo X

In the Games category, I’ve seen a cute Zelda-like adventure game from UK-based Team Sapient with a unique hexagonal-tile-based world called, er, “HexWorld”, and a horror game from Team Bahrain called Apollo X that challenges a two-player team to outrun a ghost through the use of a mobile app and a VR headset.

HexWorld’s unique look and responsive terrain – which can be changed by player actions to grant access to new places and encourages exploration – is wrapped in the promise of quest writing inspired by the works of Terry Pratchett.

Apollo X, on the other hand, is a full-on horror experience, complete with support for a heart rate monitor. When the game detects the player’s stress increasing, it actually changes the game in subtle ways – the player character’s breathing becomes audible and visual artefacts start showing, illustrating the player’s plight. The aim is to escape an angry space ghost, which seems a bit cheesy, but going on the reaction of the judges – who got to play a live demo of the game – it’s scary as hell.

Team DIG

We have a local team in this year’s Imagine Cup, Team Digital Interactive Games who are competing in the Games category with a title they’re calling Of Dragons and Sheep. This isn’t their first time here, either – they competed in last year’s Cup as well, but sadly they didn’t place anywhere with their PYA: Maze of Gods puzzle-platformer.

The two students have said from the outset that their 2016 project is a far more focused affair than last year’s was thanks to what they learned at Imagine Cup 2015. From what I saw, it’s a lot more polished, too.

As it’s a side-scroller, it’s fast and frantic, requiring skill from the player to navigate the deceptively simple-looking levels. There’s even a multi-platform, multiplayer portion that lets players figure out puzzles together. No dragons there, though – it’s purely about puzzling.

The art style is beautiful as it uses bright colours and a gorgeous cartoon style, and there’s a definite underlying sense of humour to it – it is, after all, a game about rescuing sheep.

After an impressive showing at the presentation phase, I’m crossing fingers that our guys will be selected as finalists in the Games category. The category winners will be announced on Thursday, and the Grand Winner of the entire competition will be unveiled on Friday.