Teleportal (original project name "WebXR for Learning") is a project which began at Mozilla's Global Sprint, May 2018. During the Sprint, we created the first prototype.
Thank you very much to the people who have assisted already! I intend to keep working on this in my available time and hopefully get it to the stage where it is ready to be tested out properly, in a few weeks' time.
Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality can help bring subjects to life, making learning more immersive and exciting! The idea for this project is to create a free, open repository of Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality content / learning experiences, aimed at educators and students. It will provide 3D scenes, categorised/tagged to make them easy to find by topic/curriculum. Teachers and students will be able to quickly find suitable content for lessons, study or revision. They could load the experiences directly in their web browser - and ideally also remix them, or embed them in other websites / web applications.
Credits: Pointmedia via vrfocus.com, edudemic.com
To try it out, you can access it at teleportal.org, but please note that it is currently an early alpha version. There are only a couple of sample experiences right now which are very basic. There are also bugs and various issues.
Most web browsers should be able to display the 3D content. To view the experiences in AR or VR, you will need one of the AR/VR browsers supported by aframe-xr.
Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) are on the rise. Virtual Reality is now quite accessible with cheap cardboard-based headsets. Impressive Augmented Reality experiences are now becoming possible with just a mobile phone (for example, making use of ARKit on iOS and ARCore on Android). And both VR and AR are now possible with web technologies, most notably with the up-and-coming WebXR standard ("XR" incorporates both Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality, basically meaning "Whichever Kind You Want" Reality!).
Mozilla have a WebXR library called Three.xr.js (based on the popular Three.js), plus aframe-xr (based on A-Frame) which makes it possible to develop AR and VR content on the web by writing HTML! This project currently uses aframe-xr for the AR/VR part of the prototype.
The site is currently written completely client-side. To get started:
- Check out this respository from Github.
- Serve the directory using any static site server, such as
python -m SimpleHTTPServerorpython3 -m http.servervia the command line (more info here). - View the website at the relevant local address, e.g.
localhost:8000if you use the python command above.
I'll set up further information for contributors shortly. If you have any questions in the meantime, please just reach out.
If you might like to help out, any of the following kinds of skills/experience would be especially useful:
- Education / pedagogy
- AR / VR user experience design
- AR / VR web development
- 3D modelling / animation
- Web development (HTML / CSS / JavaScript)
- Web design
What about Sketchfab, Google Poly etc.?
SketchFab and Poly a great collections of user-submitted 3D content! However, they are not aimed at education; they are general 3D repositories and the content may not be suitable/relevant for educational use.
Furthermore, the idea for this project is to try creating something as free and open as possible. Imagine something a bit more like "Wikimedia for XR"!
We hope to make use of some of these other repositories of content though, in order to source suitable Creative Commons content.
You could give the very basic alpha version a try now, but please don't have high expectations! When it's ready for proper testing, I'll shout. At that point, I'd be especially keen to find teachers who wish to try it out and provide feedback.
Thank you to:
- Boris van Hoytema for the logo
- All the creators of the Creative Commons models (please see the attributions on the website)