January Jam Week Report: Battling deadpan and building darkmode
The Virti team have been working their socks off to make our platform even better; look out for lots of exciting and useful updates in the weeks ahead! š
š„ TL;DR: The Virti team have been working their socks off to make our platform even better; look out for lots of exciting and useful updates in the weeks ahead! š
In the midst of a trans-Atlantic cold snap (yes, it was even chilly in California and Miamiā¦) the Virti team convened for a cosy virtual Cinnamon Bun meeting. But this week was special: weād all been beavering away at an array of exciting Jam Week projects, and this meeting was an opportunity to share and celebrate the outcomes as a whole team.
Every participant had chosen their own mini-mission, but all shared the goal of making the Virti platform even better. Some of the work was based on requests from colleagues, some was aimed at meeting customer needs, and other projects were purely about making the platform user experience as fantastic as possible.
So much amazing stuff was achieved in one week that this very topline summary hardly does justice to the hard work everyone put in. But we had to try! So hereās your roundup of the Jam best bitsā¦
š Virtual Humans Catching Feelings
Itās time to bid farewell to the neutral ādeadpanā facial expressions of our Virtual Humans, because 7 brand new emotive expressions have now been created. This is going to make the Virtual Humans infinitely more āhumanlikeā and up the level of immersion for users. Congrats to Bethany, Alex H and Mike A on this impressive feat of design and coding. Ā
š¬ Supercharged Subtitles
Weāre committed to making Virti platform content as accessible as possible, which is why we were thrilled with Lukas, Nils, Ben, Laurence, Aran and Mikeās efforts to devise a new and improved way to add subtitles into both pre-existing and new platform content. This team also addressed a popular customer request: adding explanatory hover-over labels to the āhotspotā interaction points in simulations to help improve user engagement.
š Unbeatable UX Upgrades:
We want everyone to love using the Virti platform as much as we do, which is why so many of this quarterās Jam projects were geared towards improving our UX:
- Nils and Chris J worked on the login/logout process, achieving a 10% improvement in load speed and making the whole process more efficient
- Oskar made huge improvements to the usability of the Interactions Editor tool
- Augustine worked on a whole host of features to make the Virti app more enjoyable to use - from a dark mode and shimmer loading effect, to button elevation animation and interactive text
š Say Hello to Content Sharing
Ever wished you could upload, download and share files directly from within the Virti platform? Well, thanks to Oskarās Jam project, now you can. This is a feature that several of our customers had been asking for, and of course we were happy to build it for them.
š¬ Winner Winner Video Embedder
When the votes from the team had been counted, there was one stand-out winning project. Congratulations to Nils, Lukas (and Charlie, of course) for their work to make the Virti Video Player embeddable - which means that Virti content can now be directly hosted on the front end of any website! ā¦..YouTube who?!
ā Special Shout Outs
We couldnāt end this roundup without shouting out a few more of the excellent projects that will have a big impact on the day-to-day operations of the team:
- SĆøs succeeded in finishing and integrating an internal Virti Wireframing Library - a place where all of Virtiās custom design content can be catalogued and easily accessed by designers.
- Heroic work was done by the dev team in improving the Virti platform sign on and account creation process for VR headset users, eliminating the code/password requirement and implementing device pairing.
- Oskar somehow found some more time (how does he do it?!) to prepare a Sentiment Analysis microservice for implementation - definitely a feature youāll want to look out for.
Calling All Customers! Have you got a suggestion for an improvement or new feature youād like to see on the Virti platform? Reach out and let us know, and weāll do our best to make your wish a reality during our next Jam week.
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