Connect the Past
From PPPP2PPPP
Step into the shoes of a turn-of-the-century Switchboard Operator using mixed reality to learn about the electrifying world of early telecommunications.
Project Overview
Connect the Past is a learning tool about the history of social connection. Learners experience the turn of the 20th century as a Switchboard Operator, engaging in an interactive simulation that combines education with entertainment, exploring the evolution of telecommunications. This app not only teaches the mechanics of manual switchboard operation but also enriches understanding of historical communication technologies and their social impacts.
Elevator Pitch
How do you think a phone call works? A computer handles it now but at one point it was facilitated entirely by hand. Our app is called Connect the Past. Set in the 1900s, you’ll learn the basics of operating a switchboard while getting to talk to a cast of characters.
Category
Education
Learnings and Growth
Confidence has been renewed in rapid development using Unity and external SDKs. This was some of the easiest project setup we’ve experienced in a good few hackathons.
Passthrough and relighting settings can get unchecked, leading to inconsistent builds on different laptops and headsets. Maintaining these settings in the repo README would be a handy strategy moving forwards and for future projects.
Feedback about the Presence Platform
The docs could be improved. Information feels scattered and simple example code snippets are sparse. Compare this Unity Quaternion API page against the Voice SDK API.
Unity uses tables, and all other API docs are listed in a visible easy-access sidebar. Their page uses minimal white space to keep the information on page for skimming. Links use color and lead to detail pages with examples and further descriptions.
On the Voice SDK page, the CSS for App Voice Experience methods is different from the CSS for Wit methods.
Building Blocks are great, and accomplish the goal of getting the basics running quickly. We did find that grab interactions were missing events like grabStart, grabEnd, and onHover. We’d like to share our script solution if there will be a bundle of utilities crowdsourced from the hack, which would be an awesome resource to have.
After setting up Wit for speech to text, we had to click an extra button to generate a manifest and resolve a Wit configuration error. This was after pasting a server key.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.