Vizi Learn

Inspiration

According to studies, the attention span of an average humans now-a-days is 3 seconds, less than that of a sparrow. This means that it is really difficult for most of us to absorb any content taught in online classes. With almost the entire world shifting towards online environments, it becomes really crucial that this issue be addressed. Current online meeting systems like Google Suite and Zoom are a 2D style flat and passive environments. It is uninteractive to be in such meetings.

The human eye is better suited to organic gamified environments over modern computer UIs, which are the bare minimum required to provide a cohesive experience. A button click to raise your hand may not be as powerful as showing the action of raising one’s hand to ask a question. Creating a gamified approach is important for increasing interaction and helping students achieve their educational goals without sacrificing motivation and grades. A gamified world where students can actually pick their avatars, move around the open world, get the feel of a classroom and do much more, can help us in achieving longer attention spans. That is Vizi Learn.

What it does

Vizi Learn is an open-world 3D meeting environment. Students/Attendees can pick their own 3D character, move around in the open space, perform actions such as raising their hand, giving a thumbs up, or even just simply dance.

A posh auditorium environment is recreated in the project to give a real-world feel as much as possible. There can be notice boards with carts and announcements placed around, creating a classroom/college feel.

How we built it

This is an amalgamation of a lot of tools and techniques. We used Blender to design and animate the 3D models. We use Adobe for character animations such as walk, idle, dance, etc. Unity Engine is used to develop the 3D part of the application. Post the development, it is converted into WebGL. For the network communication, we are have tried WebRTC, Agora, Photon, Vivox, etc. After trying and testing all of these, we have come down to Photon and Vivox as our final solutions.

Challenges we ran into

Handling the networking was the toughest part. We needed to develop the back-end keeping in mind the scalability of it as well. A meeting platform like this can have hundreds of thousands of concurrent users. So it was a very crucial piece and that was very important for us. Not the toughest challenge, but getting the lighting right was also difficult.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The world and the characters look very beautiful and are very engaging. The auditorium looks grand. I would love to keep roaming around it over and over just for the feel of it.