Overview

AntHill is a VR learning experience that was created to teach young learners about the inner workings of an ant hill. I developed AntHill with another graduate student as part of a term-long project during my Master's program. The ultimate goal of AntHil was to be as true to life as possible while providing accurate information to students through narrations and quizzes. The experience includes three ant nest rooms: an egg room, a food room, and a queen room.  In these rooms, there are animated ants and items, some of which the user can interact with. Included below is the demo video we produced.

Project Role

My partner and I developed this application in Unreal Engine 4 on the Oculus Quest. We each took responsibility for different aspects of the development while also collaborating on the documentation and smaller tasks. We were both responsible for the development of the project description and requirements as well as incorporating feedback from the professor who was supervising our learning and project development. Below, I detail three of my primary contributions. 

Ant Movements: I implemented the ant actors using existing ant models and animations sourced from the Unreal store. Multiple ants move around the ant colony, using built in Unreal Engine functions. They move between sets of points and create a bustling environment. Some ants "pick up" food and "deliver" it to the queen while others "pick up" eggs and "deliver" them to the egg room as they would in a real ant colony. Others stay in the egg room, organizing the eggs and feeding the queen. The queen herself is sized up, looming over the workers as she lays her eggs. Below is a mock-up of how the movements were planned out.

Educational Narration and Sounds: In order to provide additional information to learners to give contexts on what they experience in AntHill, I added educational audio narrations. These narrations describe each of the three room and teach learners the content they need to know to successfully complete the quiz (described below). Audio prompts are also given when interacting with an object. In addition, ambient sounds play throughout the rooms and tunnels to bring the movement of the ants to life.

Educational Quiz: A key goal of the project was not only to provide interesting entertaining content, but to teach users key takeaways about ants. We decided on a quiz so users can test their knowledge. The quiz is available at any time and is repeatable for a low-stakes, pressure free experience. Quiz scores are shown upon completion.