Inspiration
Social connection isn’t just something that’s nice to have—it’s crucial for well-being and has profound implications for health and quality of life. As a social worker, working in communities to address issues of loneliness and disconnection, I have seen this first hand. Although people wanted to feel more connected, they kept to others speaking the same language. The problem is beyond translation features – Speaking to people who struggled with this issue in the community, many people find engaging in activities intimidating, a burden. Translate features seemed awkward and not always convenient and hindered the activity itself.
What it does
Our app uses mixed reality to bring people together in a fun, immersive space that fosters social connections by break down language barriers and enable real-time communication. Esperanto XR allows people to communicate in their native language,making relationship-building easy, enjoyable, and engaging. Activities are designed to bring people together with multilingual engagement in mind. Community members get exposure to engaging with other languages in a low pressure, highly supported way using interactive games. Esperanto XR – It’s more than a language tool – it’s a bridge to human connection.
How we built it
We used Unity with Meta Core SDK as a base with Meta's Voice SDK for speech to text, the output of which was filtered into a Lambda server running llama3.3 which translated into a different language, then sent back into the project and added to a caption under a player in a multiplayer server
Challenges we ran into
The amount of different SDKs we were using ended up adding complexity to the project’s backend and caused conflicts when merged into each other.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
The back-end works well for what could be accomplished in 2 and a half days, given the scope, complexity, and vision of the project.
What we learned
The UI needed to be given greater importance, ultimately even if the project wasn’t 100% functional, a visual representation of the vision was important for getting our project across to people seeing.
What's next for Esperanto XR
The back-end works well, however, the user interface needs work in order to make the experience more intuitive for the user. Along with that, we'd like to add games to act as a natural ice breaker for the users in order to follow up on our goal of bringing people closer together.
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