HackVerse | Devpost

Problems identified.
Information Architecture for virtual profile and filtering feature.
Mood Board.
User Story.
Overhead UI for participants.
Filtering on basis of roles and skillsets.
Moment Card Feature.

Inspiration

We are creating a tool to effectively & efficiently network with people in virtual space.

Our inspiration in fact was the present hackathon itself. Working remotely, not only hinders communication between team members but also networking amongst members from other teams.

What it does

The essence of any hackathon is networking. A lot of time is spent in finding the right people. So, we developed a solution to efficiently network by filtering out people based on their roles, skillsets, and areas of interest. Hackers can also send 'intents to meet' to fellow hackers quickly.

The spirit of MIT's Hackathon is to bring people together organically based on their ideas. To keep this ethos alive in the virtual world as well, we created a virtual idea board, that you can place anywhere in the space. Other hackers can come and vote or comment on it. Thus, leading to forming better teams. These idea boards can be exported and archived by the organizers.

While meeting multiple people, keeping track of conversations becomes a challenge so we plan to introduce a tool that can capture certain parts of key conversations and embed them into a 'moment card'. These cards are personalized with a photo of hackers involved and can be revisited later even post-event.

How we built it

We noted the problems we faced as remote participants on both an individual as well as team level.
Our findings: networking is the fundamental difficulty if worked on, will improve the overall experience significantly.
Dividing the team into research & design and development team to manage time & work parallelly.
Development team built basic infrastructure for a multiplayer virtual experience in VR and desktop.
The design team researched and ideated to find out the problems faced by online participants and mentors. The team converged on a few key problems which seemed feasible & were within the scope of this hackathon.
The R&D team designed the solutions for these problems and converted them to modules to be implemented by the dev team.

Challenges we ran into

Efficiently managing the team in a remote setting.
Keeping the motivation alive.
Figuring out a way to be focused & work without prior obligations and distractions.
Collaborating amongst a bigger team is a challenge as we want the whole team to be on the same page.
Implementing ideas became a challenge because of the limited scope and time of the hackathon.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Certainly, networking. We met people from different walks of life, shared different cultures and perspectives.
We ended up with some very interesting ideas which we can apply outside the hackathon to create a big impact in society.

What we learned

Learned to work in teams - our team has > 6 participants.
The inclusive and open environment provided in this hackathon inspired us a lot.
We learned to use Gather and Miro through this hackathon.

What's next for HackVerse

Creating a complete metaverse where we can conduct future hackathons, which would also include workshop halls, a museum of past archived projects, an exhibition or a presentation space, and so on.
The conversation capturing feature "moment card" could be used to convert audio recordings to subtitles as well as translate them to different languages.
Export the contacts of people captured in the moment cards to a document format for going through the contacts conveniently.

Built With

c#
figma
miro
oculus
unity

Submitted to

Reality Hack 2022 - Hacking the Hack

Created by

I worked in feature design and application development in Unity3D. This was my first time creating a multiplayer VR app and I am glad we were able to achieve many features and prove our concept in short period of time.

MIT Reality Hack helped me re-learn how much I am capable of.

Kartik Kinge
I am an engineer by profession, explorer in mind and an art lover at heart.
I was part of the design and research team. Lead brainstorming and ideation sessions on Miro. Created UIs for Profile panel and filtering tool. I also came up with the interaction of handshake to exchange these moment cards/virtual visiting card.

Listened to various perspectives and found a middle ground as a team.

Apart from our idea, I created a virtual space on Gather called "After Party" to network, once this event is over.

Shreya Bansal
I contributed on the ideation, brainstorming and concept building. Working together with fellow designers to come up with features such as Digital visiting card, Moment Card and people filtering for effective networking.

At times it was also critical to become the bridge between the design and the development teams to resolve ideas and move forward.

Ashish Dubey
I worked on creating the multiplayer experience using Photon PUN 2. Our project was both in VR and 3D.
I integrated the User Filtration and Avatar System. I also did some UI work.
Overall i was very satisfied with what we achieved in this short duration.

Vaibhav Suri
I worked on building multiplayer VR experience with Photon PUN 2 in UNITY 3D for Oculus, VR Environment Designing and playing with C# scripts with Developer team.

Sourav Singh
I worked on enabling the VR multiplayer feature and also helped with VR environment creation in Unity 3D engine as a part of the Dev team in this project.

LOKESHWARAN S
Research scholar with XR development experience
I worked with the design and research team for ideation and design process. I brought up a concept of virtual visiting cards which two users can exchange in a virtual environment. A card contains the profile of the user. These cards can be used in team formation, grow and maintain the network/friendships post-event.
Virtual ID card concept gave direction to the team to think of various difficulties in networking and team formation which may occur in a fully virtual hackathon.

Raghav Mittal