Virti Jam Report: The Latest Innovations From The Team (Halloween Edition 🎃)
With over 20 participants split into 9 teams, the final Jam week of 2021 was the biggest and best yet. Read more to find out what projects our teams worked on and our winners.
With over 20 participants split into 9 teams, the final Jam week of 2021 was the biggest and best yet. The Virti team worked in pairs, in small groups or solo to develop a project of their choosing - the only stipulation being that their goal was aligned to Virti’s mission of improving human performance.
On Friday afternoon we all got together virtually to present our projects and to vote on the winners. As Halloween happened to be just around the corner, we also made the most of this chance to show off our most creative (and scary) costumes!
Here’s a summary of what we achieved during a very busy, collaborative and fun week.
Overall Jam Winners and 1st Place People’s Choice Award Winners: The Animorphs
Bethany, Søs, Pat, and Will worked together as Team Animorph, with the goal addressing the need for great inclusivity in Virti’s Virtual Human product.
Inspired by the iconic Sims character creation tool, Animorph explored how Virti customers could be provided with the opportunity to fully customise their avatars within the Virtual Human builder.
The team used body shape and weight as their trial feature, creating a slider button that customers could use to change the physical appearance of their avatar. Other features that could be made variable further down the line include age, height, skintone, hair colour and style, eye color, makeup & accessories.
This winning project was commended for its practical application in improving the Virtual Human product for users, as well as for the excellent presentation created so rapidly.
Most Commercially Useful and 2nd Place People’s Choice Award Winners: Team Insider Trading
Mike and Nils formed the power-duo Team Insider Trading to make video production on the Virti platform quicker and easier.
They went about this in two ways - developing a tool for in-browser screen recording with webcam overlay, and adding collaborative commenting tools to support multi-person projects. They also added in some user-friendly video editing tools to help content creators with their simulation production.
Team Insider Trading’s project will have a hugely beneficial impact for all content creators on the Virti platform, both in terms of accelerating the process, removing barriers and supporting collaboration. Look out for these new capabilities which are to be added to the platform soon!
Best Presentation Winners and 3rd Place People’s Choice Award Winners: Team Whale Catchers
Tackling the challenge of how to improve knowledge retention amongst Virti’s platform users whilst also keeping them engaged were Peter, Will, Oskar, Lukas and Ben (aka Team Whale Catchers).
Following the Google Design Sprint model, they worked on the creation of the Virti Game System. Their main goals were to encourage learners to advance their learning and encourage admins to create more learning content.
Their ideas included building notification systems, adding learning levels to the platform, introducing player rewards, rolling out learner-defined goals (meaning that the learner chooses their own learning pathway based on their personal goals and unlocks relevant content as they progress) and introducing pop-up micro-challenges (quizzes, for example) based on the learning principle of spaced repetition.
This Jam project was so successful that it inspired a follow-up workshop to further develop and action the initial ideas! Find out what happened…
Best Halloween Costume Award: Chris
This stellar effort from Chris Huston saw him take home the best-dressed prize. Rumour has it he’s still looking for his head!
Further resources:
Will Cottrell
Virti