State Machines
Digital Nomad Roles

Inspiration

We were inspired by the current trend towards remote work and the Digital Nomad concept, and how innovative organizations are moving towards this notion.

What does it take to become a Digital Nomad and be able to travel the world and work and spend quality time with your family, friends or even yourself?

What if we could help the tech skills shortage and appeal to a wide range of non-technical audiences to encourage a more diverse workforce in the tech sector at the same time?

The answer lies within the Sumerian Scene we have built, by having 4 Sumerian hosts that can tell us all about their exciting Digital careers.

What it does

Our Sumerian scene is used for educational institutions such as RMIT to promote their available courses and exciting career outcomes.

As the world moves towards Digital Transformation, many organisations are making the effort to attract and retain a talented Digital workforce by offering remote opportunities.

According to a Switzerland-based serviced office provider IWG, they found that 70 percent of professionals work remotely at least one day a week, while 53 percent work remotely for at least half of the week. In fact, the shift towards remote work has grown by 140% since 2005 according to an article by Skip the Drive. They site remote work as being beneficial for increasing diversity in terms of genders and the ageing population, and even increasing loyalty and productivity towards organisations.

Are people missing out on opportunities because they think they are not skilled enough to apply to these Digital jobs? What does it take to actually become a Digital Nomad?

The four Sumerian Virtual Hosts from diverse backgrounds have different roles such as Software Developer, Blockchain Engineer and other roles which they explain in detail. Each host has a different video associated with the RMIT online course they can do in order to gain skills necessary to attain each of their roles.

Investing in these new skills will be a win for both individuals and organisations as the world transitions to a new Digital Age.

How we built it

We built the Sumerian Scene with the AR template, and used the Skybox feature, for the background. Each virtual host used Speech and SSML components for the different roles Cognito ID to integrate Amazon services such as Polly to Sumerian. IAM roles that allowed Polly read-only access via Cognito. We used the HTML entity for displaying the host's name and their roles. HTML 3D entity for the TV with embedded YouTube video streaming. CSS and JavaScript for the code for changing the YouTube video channels. We used the State Machine component for the process flows for the virtual host actions and the remote control feature for the red sphere as a remote control to change the video on the TV. Transitions were used within the behavior of the red sphere entity on the scene to change the size to indicate that it was selected. The gesture map was used for the virtual hosts to articulate their individual speeches. The AR and default camera was configured to have the same perspective to avoid confusion in perspectives. *Further specifications are found in the Technical Specifications document in the submission.

Challenges we ran into

Maneuvering the camera and the hosts were difficult at first due to hardware limitations on my laptop. We spent some time trying to have the AR and Default Camera to line up, but after finding the relevant configuration and using short cut keys, we were able to overcome these issues.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

AWS services such as Cognito and Polly for Speech integrated very smoothly with Sumerian. We were able to convey what life changing skills that people can consider learning to become a Digital Nomad.

What we learned

3D modelling is easy with Amazon Sumerian and the Virtual Hosts makes any webpage or kiosk entertaining. Augmented reality helps with a diverse range of people to start thinking about learning technical skills to open them up to limitless opportunities.

What's next for 4 technical skills to live a #DigitalNomad life

We would like to promote this feature to various educational institutions including primary and high schools and organisations in the corporate sector.

Our aim is to inspire many people to start building on AWS and solve major issues in the Tech Sector with innovative and interactive solutions.