On 05 April 2018, the UNICEF Innovation Fund announces 6 new investments in open source technology solutions – TeliportMe is among one of six new portfolio companies to receive investment. TeliportMe joins a cohort of companies developing solutions using Virtual and Augmented Reality.

How would you describe your solution?

TeliportMe is developing RemixVR, a virtual reality (VR) tool for learning. Students can use the VR tool to immersively learn about complex concepts while also being able to create their own customisable VR experiences and stories. Take for example, learning about the solar system — you can view the solar system in VR and get to see how the planets rotate around the sun. You can also change and customise the experience (e.g changing the 360 background) — which makes learning more interesting.

A closer look…

RemixVR is a collection of VR experiences. The experience can be remixed by changing a few variables within the existing template. Apart from the users (students), developers can also add their own VR templates to the RemixVR library. RemixVR uses WebVR, an open JavaScript standard for building VR experiences on the web. This enables the VR templates used in RemixVR to be compatible across all VR platforms.

What is unique about your solution and how is it different from what currently exists?

We believe that the remixing capability of RemixVR — which helps students to customise their own VR experiences — is what sets us apart. The ability for students to decide how they want to consume information or how they want interact with an experience can enhance how students learn. RemixVR also differentiates itself with its easy-to-use interface — students can build their own custom VR experiences through a selection of built in tools.

Most importantly, our goal is to make RemixVR work for everyone, everywhere. To accomplish this, we use web-based technologies – this enhances shareability across platforms (e.g no need to install any app). An extensive documentation will be made available to guide how to create custom VR experiences and how to share it across various online platforms.

Why does being open-source make your solution better?

With an open source solution, we’re able to invite users and developers from around the world to help us enhance or develop new VR building blocks for RemixVR. And through their feedback, we can make sure we build our product to suit their needs. We also believe that the more VR experiences are created and stored in our platform, the better we can shape our product — so having our solution open source can encourage more developers and users to freely contribute.

How did you come up with your solution and what inspired you to form your company?

Our team has been working with VR products and projects for years. What we’ve realized is that education as one of the key industries that can benefit from VR technologies and that VR is going to be a huge skill for the future workforce. Combining these two learnings, we came up with RemixVR, aimed to help students learn and understand how VR works while providing a platform that VR developers (who are in a position to influence the growth of VR industry) can contribute towards.

How did your team come together? What is your team’s MO and drive towards the problem you’re trying to solve?

Our team all have been working on 360 imagery for over 6 years (360 images and 360 videos have been the foundation towards the development VR products). We all see the growing opportunity VR can bring to learning, this spark us to work together and develop RemixVR. 

As our team is well experienced in deploying applications to web, iOS and Android platforms including delivering content to millions of users, and having deep understanding of the technicalities of VR technologies — we are focused to be to create, design, build, and deliver a scalable VR content platform that works for all.

What do you plan on doing with UNICEF’s Venture Fund investment and how will you use that to leverage raising follow-on investment?

Being part of the UNICEF Innovation Fund will help us to create more remixable VR templates that students can use with ease. It will also help us create an extensive documentation which will provide guidance to users on how to create their own VR templates and how they can share with the community. We also plan on to hire new team members to help us create new VR templates and to reach more users (starting with schools).

Photo Credits | Top: © UNICEF/UN0280988/Vishwanathan | In Article: © Teliportme