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VR Education Toolkit — HackIllinois 2018 Entry and Prize Winner
My HackIllinois 2018 team project: a VR Education Toolkit that lets educators build VR lessons without coding. Won the Fulcrum GT commercial viability prize.
Me and my team (David Hickox, Alchaeus Lam, and Luke Stumpf) built a VR Education Toolkit at HackIllinois 2018 in 36 hours. The goal: let educators create immersive VR lessons without writing a single line of code or modeling anything from scratch.
The toolkit is built on Unity and uses a no-code, drag-and-drop system. Teachers pull in 3D assets from Google Poly, Tilt Brush, and Google Blocks, drop them into preconfigured scenes, and publish. It also supports 360-degree videos as environments — useful for virtual field trips or contextual introductions before jumping into 3D.
Two demo scenes ship with the toolkit:
- Virtual chemistry classroom — an interactive experiment showing hydrogen and oxygen combining to form water, manipulated with a VR controller
- 360 video scene — a video that transitions into a 3D classroom environment populated with objects from the footage
Built and demoed on Gear VR, but the architecture ports easily to Daydream, HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, and Windows Mixed Reality. I led the team, built the core VR interaction framework and prefab pipeline, and managed the GitHub repo and DevPost. We presented a live demo at the closing ceremony and won the Fulcrum GT prize for best commercial viability of an open source project.
Below is the closing ceremony presentation: