Tradie Hub

Inspiration

Back in 2019, I was part of a project aimed at helping high school students explore trade-based careers. Our goal was to create a social hub where young people could connect, learn, and share experiences about different trades. One key feature was a central social room — a welcoming space for students to chat and interact before branching off into more focused rooms dedicated to specific trades. This project is a recreation of that central room.

What it does

This space serves as a social hub where users can simply hang out and connect. It was originally created for the team I worked with on the earlier project, but I’ve now ported it over to Meta Worlds so others can experience and enjoy it as well.

How we built it

We spent a lot of time looking for old assets on USBs and hard drives that we could use before porting it and placing all assets in their right place. We also used the power of METAs Generative AI to replace any assets we could not find.

Challenges we ran into

We started by digging through old USBs and hard drives to recover as many of the original assets as possible. Once everything was gathered, we ported the project and carefully placed each asset in its proper location. For any missing elements, we used Meta’s Generative AI tools to recreate or enhance them, helping bring the original vision back to life.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I’m proud of how quickly everything came together — the entire setup was rebuilt and running in just about 10 hours. Considering the original project was built in the Unity engine, getting it smoothly ported over and functional in Meta Worlds was a big achievement.

What we learned

My key takeaway was an understanding of the trade-offs between using custom and AI-generated assets. While AI outputs were sometimes unpredictable, the efficiency of the setup process provided a valuable advantage over the need for perfect results.

What's next for Tradie Hub

I would love to actually go ahead and create the different rooms that would have the user learn more about specific trades and educational paths showing them that these career paths are viable and rewarding adventures the students can go down. Would love to use the NPCs more as well creating an almost career expo experience.