School of the Ancients

School of the Ancients

Inspiration

This world was inspired by Cosmos: Seven Wonders of the New World — a vision of a future world fair where historical figures are brought back to life as simulations. I wanted to explore what a virtual interactive museum and classroom of the future could look like inside Horizon Worlds. link

What It Does

School of the Ancients is a remixable world where players can meet Cleopatra, Galileo, and Leonardo da Vinci. Each NPC can greet visitors, respond to simple prompts, and answer three themed questions about their life and legacy. Interactive props, like Galileo’s telescope, Cleopatra's Scepter, and Leonardo’s book of inventions, add extra layers of engagement.

How We Built It

Used the AI NPC Examples from Profit and Perish as a base.
Procedurally generated an environment, then baked it into assets.
Designed three distinct zones (Egyptian plaza, hilltop observatory, beach workshop).
Added podiums with interactive buttons (Yes, No, Tell me more, plus 3 custom questions per NPC).
Customized NPC backstories, voices, and props to reflect each historical figure.

Challenges We Ran Into

The AI Speech (Voice-Only) mode does not currently support player speech input, so I designed around button and prop interactions.
Lost an early environment build because I hadn’t saved the procedural output as a prefab and rebuilt from backup seed and learned to checkpoint aggressively.
Limited time (started project 48 hours before deadline) meant prioritizing basic features over character animation.

Accomplishments

Built a complete, remixable world in under 48 hours.
Established a virtual interactive museum/classroom model that could be extended to any historical figure.
Published assets and a clear onboarding panel so others can remix and learn.

What We Learned

The importance of modular design: NPCs, props, and environments as separate prefabs.
How to work with Horizon Worlds’ AI NPC Gizmo.
That small interactions (props, ambient sound) can make a world feel alive, even without full animation.
How the **Creator Assistant can generate 3D meshes and auto-texturize them from prompts. By saving the results as prefabs, we could quickly drag-and-drop artifacts into the world. This showed how powerful the workflow is for world creation.

Project History

2020 — Inspiration: Cosmos: Seven Wonders of the New World link
2024 — Google Gemini API Developer Competition: web prototype https://github.com/thetopham/schooloftheancients
2025 — Meta Worlds: https://github.com/thetopham/school-of-the-ancients-vr

What’s Next

Add more figures (Albert Einstien, Newton, Ada Lovelace).
Expand interactivity (quests like “Ask me 3 things” to unlock new exhibits).
Integrate voice input once Meta exposes speech-to-text to creators.
Build a connected “World’s Fair of the Future” hub with multiple remixable exhibits.