Innovation Unlocked: the Virti Summer Jam Report
In line with our mission to improve human performance, we actively encourage every Virti employee to dedicate 20% of their working hours to learning and upskilling. Here are the results.
Innovation Unlocked: the Virti Summer Jam Report
In line with our mission to improve human performance, supporting our team member’s creative expression and professional development is a top priority here at Virti. In fact, it’s so important that we actively encourage every Virti employee to dedicate 20% of their working hours to learning and upskilling.
A key part of our 20% commitment, and a highlight in the Virti annual calendar, are our quarterly Jams. These week-long, whole-team events are an opportunity to set routine work aside and to pursue personal projects aligned with Virti’s mission and values. At the end of the week, the teams come together to present, discuss and celebrate their work.
The third Jam of 2021 took place in the last week of July, and, as expected, the output did not disappoint. The esteemed judging panel (Customer Success Manager Owen, CRO Kurt and Product Manager Peter) selected two out of the six competing teams as the joint winners, with one more duo being highly commended. Read on for the round-up…
Wireframing for VR environments [highly commended]
Product Designer Søs and Unity Developer Will joined forces to pursue their shared ambition of creating a new infrastructure for the building of virtual environments. Their goal: to complement the existing ‘wireframing’ process with a visual and practical tool that would allow them to design and develop in 360° VR.
Their team, The Rapids, built a sophisticated rapid prototyping framework using Gravity Sketch, a software that allows easy organic modelling in 1:1 scale. This new framework allows for experimenting within a controlled technical framework before development. It also makes it possible to collect actionable data and to gather correct measurements for angles and scales for UI.
This enhanced wireframing capability will help Søs and Will to improve the UX in their future designs, ensuring that Virti platform users have the best possible experience in the VR environment.
Pioneering sentiment analysis for soft skills training [winner]
Virti’s Virtual Humans soft skills training tool gathers a great deal of rich data on user performance, but before this Jam, language sentiment was not one of them. This presented the perfect challenge for React Developer Mike, Junior React Developer Oskar and UI/UX/QA Engineer Andy who took it upon themselves to work on this brand new feature to improve soft-skills training across Virti’s platforms.
Their team, The Good, The Bad and The Neutral, built a sentiment analysis tool capable of rating a speaker’s language as ‘positive’, ‘negative’ or ‘neutral’. By collating and analysing speech, the tool generates a score that can be added to the user’s soft skills learning report, helping them to better understand how to adapt their language in order to have better conversations.
Look out for this addition to the Virti Virtual Human, coming soon.
Superior step-by-step storyboarding [winner]
Lead Developer Lukas, Developer Aran and Senior React Developer Adam (aka Charlie’s Angels) formed a power-trio to create a brand new app for Virti’s customers.
The Virti Sim Planner was built to provide start-to-finish support for novice creators looking to design and film bespoke content to use on Virti’s platform. From storyboarding to scripting, hiring actors and sourcing tech equipment, the Planner streamlines and collates all of the existing information and guidance onto one user-friendly app. It also allows the user to create content from within the app, removing potential barriers from the creation process.
The team wanted to prove that moving from in-person simulation to recording, editing and learning planning need not be a daunting task, and Judges noted how this app has the potential to add significant value for Virti’s customers. The team is working on developing it further, so watch this space to find out when it will be launched.
