Our idea with Explorer was to make education immersive. The collaborative spirit of learning is the primary driving force behind this project. We aim to make online learning more immersive and foster creative learning through the use of Explorer.
This application is a collection of different rooms. Each room has its own theme. Users can join the rooms and interact with each other. The user will have a Virtual 3D experience i.e. it will make the user feel like he/she is really in the room and interacting with different people.
We used Three.js, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, WebGL, Google Poly for the frontend website and we built our virtual rooms using the awesome Mozilla Hubs.
As a team of three, we are all completely new to the world of 3D on a browser. Using Three.js and WebGL were definitely the biggest challenges we faced, but we're happy with the way our website ended up looking. We faced a lot of issues during the development of rooms, such as hitting memory caps, and the brainstorming of designs and layouts for our rooms took a little too long. We also are a team with opposite time zones so working together was also a challenge we are proud to have overcome!
As complete beginners in this sort of stuff, we are extremely happy with the way the project turned out, and are extremely grateful for everything we learned this weekend. We are also happy with the enormous amount of different themed rooms we developed in just one weekend.
We learned a lot of stuff about the 3D experience with Three.js and Mozilla Hubs. We learned how Three.js works, we used model-viewer to render our 3D assets and that was a joy to learn about. We think we may have found a passion for 3D and this is just one of the many more projects we are looking forward to working on!
Obviously, as an MVP, we concentrated on getting things to work. As for our next steps, we expect to fully support community-supported rooms and hope to integrate an incentive system to encourage virtual learning. We also plan on hosting holiday-themed events around the year to keep things interesting! :D