Virtual Home Visit
Curtin University
2014 · CTO & lead developer · shipped
A serious game for training physiotherapy students — learners run a simulated home visit, talk to avatars, classify falls hazards and build a management plan. Winner of Curtin's Teaching and Learning Award.
Technologies: JavaScript, Three.js, HTML5, WebVR, 3ds Max, SCORM
Award announcement · ResponsiveVoice write-up
Related expertise: Real-time 3D on the web, VR, AR & spatial, 3D Content Pipeline
Overview
Virtual Home Visit is a game-based learning system for trainee health and community professionals. The learner runs a simulated home visit to an older adult, with the goal of supporting them to keep living at home.
Video: Curtin University — Virtual Home Visit
Inside the visit the learner talks to avatars to read the social setting, identifies and classifies fall risks and hazards around the home, and then formulates a specific management plan. It runs over the web on phones, tablets and computers, or in a VR headset.
Background and development
It was the first project I did after joining Hyperspace in 2014. I designed the architecture, hired the 3D artists and built the game on Three.js.
Running it in a 2014 browser, often Internet Explorer inside the university's LMS, meant working around a lot of limits, and the company's old avatar library had to be converted for the web along the way. More in Real-time 3D on the web. It also ran in VR headsets, at a time when VR in the browser was still experimental. More in VR, AR & spatial.
The conversations were written in ChatMapper and spoken by ResponsiveVoice, our text-to-speech engine. The game was delivered as a SCORM package, so Curtin could run it from their existing LMS.
Much of what we built for it, from the avatar pipeline to the dialogue system, became the base of the Hyperspace platform.
Virtual Home Visit won the Teaching and Learning Award at the Curtin Commercial Innovation Awards, for the team led by Anne Furness at Curtin's School of Physiotherapy and Exercise Science.
My involvement
- Led the project's development, managing the artists and developers who built it.
- Worked with Curtin's team to turn their clinical requirements into the game's scenario.
- Built the dialogue system and the ChatMapper importers, and integrated ResponsiveVoice for the characters' voices.
- Built it to run on phones, tablets, desktops and VR headsets.