Virti Jam Report: Making gains through gamification
It’s time for our latest Jam week roundup… And what a jam-packed five days it was! So settle in and get ready for a whistle stop tour of our talented team’s latest projects.
It’s time for our latest Jam week roundup… And what a jam-packed five days it was! So settle in and get ready for a whistle stop tour of our talented team’s latest projects.
This time, six teams went head-to-head in a bid to develop a unique project to improve and enhance the Virti platform and, of course, be crowned Jam week champions!
The theme of April’s Jam was ‘gamification’, so it promised to be full of fun and flair, as well as innovation - and it certainly didn’t disappoint! Read on to discover each team’s game plan and find out which project beat the rest of the competition to come out on top in the highly anticipated team vote…
Player 1 🕵️♂️ ‘Lukas Did It’ Murder Mystery
Our first team gave Agatha Christie a run for her money with their Virtual Human Murder Mystery. Nils (Chief Technology Officer) and Bethany (3D Artist) launched their very own investigation into the exciting capabilities of the Virti Virtual Human. The result: a course enabling users to turn detective and solve a mystery with the help of virtual detective Bill Butler.
Using a branching AI function, the team first created a ‘briefing’ in which users can ask questions and gather key information about the case. Once armed with some essential clues, they are then able to interrogate a host of Virtual Human suspects. Here, the team switched from branching to free flow AI interaction, enabling a more open, user-driven conversation. A time limit was also added to the interrogations to keep users on their toes!
This project opens the door for an exciting range of new Virtual Human applications providing fun and interactive gamified training courses. Whodunnit? We’ll leave that up to you to solve…
Player 2 ❓ Lukahoot Quiz Mode
Up next, Lukas (Unity Developer Lead) and Oskar (Junior React Developer) set out to make content creation easier and more accessible for users, and to increase the platform’s daily active users (DAU) with their project: Quiz Mode. Loosely based on the wildly popular ‘Kahoot’, Quiz Mode enables users to seamlessly create high-value content without having to dedicate large amounts of time to gathering external media (video, images or graphics) first.
Creators can input questions and multiple choice answer options into a pre-designed structure, resulting in ready-made, personalized content that can be uploaded and shared on-demand. Team members can be put head-to-head to answer questions on a common workplace process, for example. There’s also the potential to build databases into the application to store an archive of previous questions and answers, so that users can recycle and reuse them whenever needed. Smart!
Player 3 🌥 Virtual Human in the Cloud
For his project, Alex H (Lead Unity Developer) sought an alternative method of displaying Virtual Human on the web to improve image quality and user experience (UX). Inspired by the use of Cloud streaming by popular gaming companies like Microsoft Xbox, Alex realized that this hadn’t yet been explored in a corporate setting, and decided it was time to change this.
Alex’s goal was to host the Virtual Human application on a cloud server which could then stream the content down to browsers in a similar way to video. The benefit? With the Virtual Human hosted on a separate server, nothing has to be embedded in the browser, reducing memory issues and making the content stream more stable. This results in higher visual fidelity and also reduces the number of asset bundles that have to be created for each course or piece of content. The team is now investigating the best cloud-streaming options for Virtual Human, to optimize the browser experience.
Player 4 🏠 360 Escape Room
Taking on the ultimate game - and everybody’s favorite team-building activity - were Laurence (Learning Experience Designer) and Bethany. Complete with a code-cracking keypad, beach location and red-herrings aplenty, they repurposed rooms from within our Virtual Human neighborhood to create a fully immersive, virtual escape room.
Users were able to navigate the room (and a beach!), search for clues that were signposted around the space and use this information to solve challenges along the way. Notes could be made throughout the activity, and any evidence found could be saved into a virtual inventory for later reference. This kind of content will make a great addition to virtual or hybrid events, and make remote team-building easier than ever before!
Special mentions
Other projects from the week included Chris J and (Mobile Developer) Augustine’s deep link development, designed to seamlessly connect the website to the Virti app for mobile users, and Bethany, Mike and Andy’s Virtiverse, a collaborative virtual environment in which team members can inhabit a virtual space and interact using personalized 3D avatars.
And the winner is…🏆
The competition was fierce, but ultimately only one team could lift the Jam week trophy. Taking the title this time were Laurence and Bethany, with their 360-degree immersive escape room - a truly innovative use of gamification to make a versatile, fun and valuable application for our Interactive Video platform.
And that’s it for another Jam week! Every single team brought their A-game and produced some really exciting projects. Keep your eyes peeled over the coming weeks and months as these are put into action to help level up a number of features across the Virti platform.
Have you got a suggestion or an idea for a new feature you’d like to see implemented across the Virti platform? Tell us about it, and you could see your idea brought to life during our next Jam Week!
Explore previous Jam Week blogs:
The Virti Team
The Virti Team