Inspiration
Our team members Diego and Emelin are high schoolers, and they noticed that they and many others around them were always interested in driving, so we thought it would be a good idea if schools offered some sort of driving lessons. We eventually came to the idea of providing driving courses through VR in order to teach high school students about the rules of the road in a more accessible and immersive way, calling the project Driving & Thriving. We also wanted to add an AI component in the form of a chat box that users can use to ask questions about specific rules.
What it does
The VR driving course works by having the user drive a car in VR, going through different levels that each correspond to an individual rule of driving. For instance, there would be a level solely focused on yellow lines, which is also the one we developed for our project. If a user crosses a yellow line, they would “lose”, be taken to another screen, and be told about yellow lines. The user can then refer to the AI chat box if they had any further questions; once the user is satisfied, they can try again.
How we built it
We used Unity in order to create the VR environment for the driving course, which would include the main features of our project: the driving of the car and the yellow lines level. As for the AI, we used the ChatGPT API in order to create a connection with ChatGPT by which the user could communicate with it. We implemented this separately, so not in our VR environment, using VS Code due to issues we had with implementing it directly into Unity.
Challenges we ran into
One of the greatest challenges we ran into was implementing the ChatGPT API into Unity. We tried several different methods, but we could not get it to function. Eventually, recognizing that time was running out and we were making little progress, we opted to write the implementation in VS Code, writing it in Python instead of C# and using VS Code’s terminal to simulate the interaction the user would have with the AI. Essentially, we scrapped putting it into Unity and decided to just make it functional to use as a proof of concept.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
An accomplishment we are proud of is getting the VR driving course to function properly. It took a tremendous amount of effort and dedication from our lead programmer Sunnah to at least develop a proof of concept, and we are all glad that it worked out in the end and are thankful for his tireless effort.
What we learned
The main thing we learned through our experience during this hackathon is just how versatile VR technology is in terms of where it can be applied. In other words, VR technology can serve several purposes in various fields. In our case, for instance, it serves an educational purpose, but other purposes include recreational, like in the field of gaming, or for job-related purposes.
What's next for Driving & Thriving
In terms of the future scope of our project, apart from fully implementing our main features, we thought about incorporating a full driving setup with a steering wheel, gear shift, and more in order to increase the immersion and allow for training of driving skills instead of just the rules. We also recognized that this idea doesn’t have to be limited to just high school students; it can also help adults who don’t know how to drive learn how to as well.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.