XTOPIA. Your Personalized 3D School in the Metaverse

THE PROBLEM OF STUDENT DISENGAGEMENT

Student disengagement takes a variety of forms, and manifests on a spectrum going from not paying attention, not completing school work, disruptive behavior, withdrawal, underachievement, truancy and finally, school refusal. Disengagement in the classroom can be detrimental to student retention and learning, and can have lifelong consequences by stunting an individual’s future prospect for growth, independence and prosperity.  

THE SCALE OF THE PROBLEM  

A Gallup study showed that 24 percent of fifth graders were disengaged in the United States. That percentage grew to 39 percent for middle school students and 56 percent for students in high school. (And that 56 percent doesn't include all those disengaged youths who had already dropped out.)

Sadly, dropping out does remain an option for many young people — 1.3 million students leave high school each year without a diploma. 

WHY IT PERSISTS 

There are several things that might help to explain why this is happening -- ranging from our overzealous focus on standardized testing and curricula to our lack of experiential and project-based learning pathways for students -- not to mention the lack of pathways for students who will not and do not want to go on to college. (Gallup) Young people feel that who they are and what they want to become doesn’t matter to teachers and schools. While students are required to fit into a restrictive school structure, culture, and curriculum, schools do little to fit themselves to their students.

IN SHORT 

Learner disengagement is correlated with a : 

• lack of personalization of the learning experience,

• lack of experiential learning, 

• lack of connection with the real world and real-world outcomes that learning can help students access. 

XTOPIA is a web-based social virtual reality platform which empowers learners to meet with instructors in experiential learning environments via personalized photo-realistic avatars, and to design their own interactive and experiential 3D classes, and . In this 3D school in the metaverse, which can be accessed in person or remotely, students can teleport to Antarctica for biology class, learn science on Mars, climb fractal pyramids in mathematics class,   time-travel during History class, among other transformative engaging experiences. 

Personalized Avatars for Embodied Student-Focused Learning 

The XTOPIA platform allows students and teachers to automatically generate — via our machine learning-powered app — full-body 3D animated avatars of themselves based on a single input: a 2D photo they either snap by activating their webcam or by uploading it to the server. The platform then allows them to customize via avatar blend shapes the appearance of their 3D avatars (size, proportions of its limbs, etc.) and their 3D clothing. 

Experiential Classrooms for Engaging and Immersive Learning 

After having customized their avatar and its clothing, the learner can then log into the 3D school lobby, meet students and teachers who are also tele-present in the shared CG environment, via their own personalized and photorealistic avatars — in a similar way as they would in the physical world. From the 3D school lobby, the learner can then direct themselves in 3D towards the interactive classrooms they are expected to attend depending on the school schedule of the day. 

If it is a English class for instance, learners will be directed to any of the English learning classrooms which are designed to be thought-provoking in order to drive student engagement: e.g. users can learn/teach English from the deck of a 3D ferry going around the Statue of Liberty, on a 3D Golden Gate Bridge overlooking the San Francisco Bay, or even from a 3D re-enactment of the Oval Office in the White House. 

If it is History class time, then learners will log in the 3D Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, or will teleport to the top of the 3D re-enactment of the 5th century BC Acropolis to learn about the origin of democracy, or even further in time, can explore the Ziggurat of Ur in the 2nd millenium BC to immerse in ancient civilizations.

Student-Designed Learning Worlds

The learner logs in and accesses a user-friendly web-based 3D classroom editor. 

The educator can either drag-and-drop professionally designed ready-to-learn template worlds, build their own 3D classroom by dragging and dropping elementary classroom 3D assets (tables, chairs, whiteboard) through a WYSIWYG (« what you see is what you get ») interface. 

The learner can then review the 3D learning world created in an intuitive viewport and export the scene to the 3D School Platform: a URL is automatically generated as soon as the user publishes the scenes and now the user can invite their peers by sharing the URL with the room code and password.

A Career Simulator to Bridge the Gap between Learning Paths and Real-World Outcomes 

At XTOPIA, learners can also access our immersive career simulator which empowers them to test-drive different professional futures, teleport and virtually visit workplaces, embody inspiring professionals. This allows learners to realize that their learning paths can have very real-world learning outcomes, and it helps them connect the dots between the learning they do at school and the kind of life they can then aspire to. It makes learning so much more concrete and pragmatic, which helps re-engage learners. 

Existing Features Depending on User Type: Student / Teacher / Administrator  

Whether the user is a student, teacher or administrator, they will have different set of permissions and features available to them to allow them to perform their learning, teaching, administrating tasks. 

Below is a list of features that are available for all users within 3D interactive classrooms: 

- Interacting remotely via avatars: voice / chat / pre-baked avatar animations to greet, clap, thank, etc, 

• Screen sharing, 

• Webcam sharing. 

Below is the list of features that are specific to the teacher and the administrator: 

• Presenting an image / video / powerpoint slide deck on a 3D screen,

• Placing a 3D object in 3D space inside of the immersive classroom, 

• Use a pen tool to point to specific direction in 3D space and/or in slide deck, or draw on white board, 

• Muting or kicking a student out of the 3D classroom as part of a gradual in-VR disciplinary framework. 

A Hardware-Agnostic Platform to Enable Frugal and Rapid Deployment  

This 3D school is built on a web virtual reality (webVR) framework which makes it accessible from any browser on any device (virtual reality headsets, tablets, smartphones, PCs). The user simply needs to input the URL of the school lobby in their browser on the device that is available to them, and is seamlessly connected to the 3D school. There is no need for any bespoke expensive hardware to learn and teach remotely, which makes this 3D school’s technological framework instantaneously scalable and truly inclusive. 

This cloud-based virtual reality platform is by design hardware-agnostic and is accessible via an internet browser on the following devices: 

• Personal Computer / Desktop + laptop (both Mac and PC) 

• Tablet 

• Smartphone 

• Standalone VR headset (e.g. Oculus Quest 2, HTC Vive)

• Mobile VR headset (compatible with a smartphone, both Android and iOS) and a bluetooth gamepad controller (e.g. XBOX controller or affiliated)

WHO THE TARGET POPULATION IS 

Our solution targets the three most common profiles of disengaged learners: 

(1) behaviorally disengaged, not involved in academic and social or extracurricular activities 

(2) emotionally disengaged:  learners who demonstrate negative reactions to teachers, classmates, academics, and school 

(3) cognitively disengaged: learners who lose interest in thought processes and intellect. 

THE NEEDS OF THE TARGET POPULATION 

Generation Z and Alpha are already fully engaged with gaming-oriented tools and services which are considered today to be « proto-metaverse » platforms. 

According to Roblox’ CEO, David Baszucki, Roblox’ proto-metaverse matches the social and gaming preferences and desires of Generations Z and Alpha: 

• Identity – avatars that reflect players’ real or imagined selves and remain present and consistent everywhere,

• Friends – the ability to socialize and play with real-world friends but also befriend and interact with others in-world,

• Immersiveness – engagement with a fully-formed alternative world,

• Ubiquity – the ability to create and play from anywhere, on all types of devices,

• Variety – accommodation of diverse user interests and habits, via deep, wide content,

• Low friction – easy onboarding and transitions, to encourage trying new things. 

This list is an accurate description of the different features of the 3D School Platform, which allows for an embodied, personalized, social and immersive learning experience accessible from any device. 

HOW THE SOLUTION SERVES THE TARGET POPULATION 

• We engage learners cognitively by incorporate technology. The targeted learners may have a low didactic literacy in a variety of subject-matters, but have high technological literacy. We incorporate cutting-edge tech such as machine learning and web-based social virtual reality in the classroom to drive student’s self-learning.

• We enable learners to build their own learning social network. Learners can design their own 3D worlds and invite their peers to share a learning journey together: it is an open forum which allows students to interact with one another while completing homework and ask questions to faculty.

• We empower learners to directly dive into the “Why?". We connect what learners are learning to the larger context. Coding class is conducted in the middle of a motherboard, biology class is conducted in the middle of a 3D garden where they can experience photosynthesis from the perspective of a flower, etc. 

• We harness a visual and music-smart learning platform to appeal to different types of intelligences. The 3D school platform enables learning that engages multiple learning types (auditory, visual, kinetic) and that can enhance the overall learning experience. 
  

• We put learners' sense of agency and creativity front and center. Learners fully participate in the collective co-creation of learning worlds they can share with their peers. 

WHAT WE DO TO IDENTIFY NEEDS

• Partnerships:  We partnered with community groups both in the Miami-Dade area and in France to do preliminary virtual reality demos and source information from the get-go as we started developing the platform. 

• Observation: While we were conducting virtual reality demos to test out a variety of prototypes and content types (360° videos / 3D CGI worlds), we observed how learners engaged with the hardware and software, how easily they picked up on the technology. 

• Interviews: We were also able to conduct interviews with learners to challenge our assumptions, and get a sense of what their main points were, and how we could best address them. We tested our interface with them to see how easy to use it was for them to adopt it with minimal training.

Our team is internationally recognized for its pioneering VR initiatives for social impact in a variety of sectors: healthcare, education, peacebuilding. We are currently delivering 3 different metaverse-oriented projects for the government on three different continents, in the USA, Europe and Asia: with local government (Miami-Dade County Public Schools), with the US federal government (United States Institute of Peace - Pakistan Branch) and with the French government. Last year, we were awarded an innovation prize from the US National Academy of Medicine for our groundbreaking work in VR for the mental well-being of older adults.  

Our team has the much needed experience and interdisciplinary expertise it takes to deliver scalable edtech impact through immersive technology: 3D modeling skills, webVR development competencies, direct experience in the field of education, major govtech precedents.

Our team is also representative of the population we are aspiring to serve. Our talented 3D artist, Reda Tinebinal, stems from the Moroccan beach town of Agadir and is the first person in his family to graduate from college and to hold a higher education degree. He has directly witnessed and experienced the transformative power of education and its ability to open up doors. In that respect, he is extremely eager to give back and offer unique educational opportunities to youth that might not be so fortunate as him. 

We were invited at the 2020 World Expo as speakers to talk about our VR projects. Here is our manifesto in one of the Expo books: https://www.worldmajlisseries....

We are applying to SOLVE because we inherently believe in its global community of creative social entrepreneurs and its crowdsourcing methodology. We believe we can find our next team member or next client at a SOLVE stakeholder meeting because we will be reunited with teams who are driven by the same insatiable thirst for scalable tech-enabled solutions to humanity’s most pressing challenges. 

We know that the SOLVE team of mentors most probably has already tackled the challenges we will face tomorrow and we would greatly appreciate the game-changing opportunity to benefit from world-class guidance. 

Through SOLVE's extensive network, we hope to grow and scale much more rapidly. We have already proved that this technology works and yields real-world benefits for students re-engagement. Now we are in the perfect position to bring this solution to more public school districts and private schools around the nation. 

This 3D personalized school is radically innovative because it provides a personalized immersive learning experience at scale to tackle the issue of student disengagement. In general, either learning experiences are very personalized but not very scalable, or scalable platforms do not allow for a personalized experience. XTOPIA manages to do both, be personalized and scalable because : 

1. it harnesses machine learning to empower learners to automatically generate their personalized avatars, 

2. it leverages user-generated content which makes it empowering for the user (learner and instructor) as they are masters of their own learning worlds. By tapping into the power of user-generated content and more specifically, educator-generated classrooms, the 3D School Platform can truly scale across the nation and swiftly adapt to an unlimited number of disciplines and education settings.  

3. it leverages pre-existing educational content. It is easy for instructors and learners to access from the web other learning resources, like lesson plans or pre-existing images, videos, documents from within their own 3D learning worlds. VR content creation is expensive and takes time, which explains why other metaverse-like platforms are empty and other edtech solutions tackle one subject one application at a time, which is not a sustainable and rapid content production model. We are ready to deploy because we have a much more pragmatic approach. 

4. it is not an application, it’s a platform. The proposed innovation is not a singular application with limited scope and educational impact, but rather an open immersive platform which is capable of hosting and integrating today pre-existing teaching content and media previously developed for analog education settings (2D documents such as lesson plans, 2D videos, 2D websites, as well as 360°/180° videos). 

5. it is user-friendly for facilitated intergenerational user adoption (learner, instructor, administrator). In order to access the platform, there is no need to install an application. Users simply need to go to the browser on the device of their choice, input the relevant URL and they are in. The immediacy and user-friendliness of the platform make it easy and intuitive to adopt for a diverse cross-generational population (students, teachers, administrators) with variable digital literacy skills. 

6. it is an open hub that can crowdsource an indefinite number of learning worlds, not a singular application. Ultimately it could act as a catalyst for innovation in this space, and as a marketplace for ed-tech 3D webVR-ready items (CGI classrooms, 3D student uniforms, 3D models of learning resources directly mapped to STEAM curricula, etc.

Our impact goals are to engage 10,000 learners by the end of 2022 and 50,000 by the end of 2023. Because we are web-based, can easily interface with existing educational content, and are hardware-agnostic, we can set up learners for success at scale. 

We can realistically accomplish our impact goals through our existing client base: Miami-Dade County Public Schools (4th largest school district in the US) and the French Employment Office (partnering with the Department of Education). 

Our impact indicators are: 

- number of learners engaged,

- number of ready-to-learn worlds used,

- number of learning worlds created from scratch. 

Below is a brief description of our research questions, sample characteristics, test education settings, instruments and procedures that we utilize to test and measure the progress we have achieved. 

Usability: 

• Does the platform function as intended for both students and educators? 

• Are users able to understand and easily learn how to use the platform and have it function effectively and efficiently?

Fidelity of Implementation: 

• To what extent is the platform being delivered as it was designed to be by end users in a remote education setting?

• To what extent is the platform being delivered as it was designed to be by end users in an in-person education setting? 

• After testing the platform, are users engaged by the prototype and the description of the full product? 

Promise of Education Outcomes Depending on Use in Different Education Settings: 

• To what extent does the use of the platform result in an increase in student engagement, motivation and performance in a remote education setting?

• To what extent does the use of the platform result in an increase in student engagement, motivation and performance in an in-person education setting?

Measurement Instruments 

We suggest to test the different intended outcomes with the following measurement instruments: 

• Student engagement, as measured through objective and measurable attendance and course completion rates, coupled with self-report measures (e.g. research survey with questions on a likert scale),

• Student motivation, as measured by the Student Motivation Scale, 

• Student performance, as measured by comparing the average of grades received compared to previous years.

Procedures 

Hypotheses to be tested: 

• The use of the platform is comparatively more impactful at improving student outcomes in remote education settings.

• The more the platform provides a personalized learning experience with customized educator-generated classrooms, the more educator engagement and motivation increase, the more student engagement and motivation increase.

Our theory change can be summarized as: "If we make learning a personal, experiential and social affair, then they will stay." 

INPUTS / ACTIVITIES 

We provide learners access to an immersive and personalized web-based school where they can build their own learning worlds and adventures, and can seamlessly access them with their peers through photorealistic personalized avatars via the device of their choice (VR headset, tablet, smartphone, PC.) 

OUTPUTS 

The output for this input is greater engagement in this personalized experiential learning journey for learners on a variety of levels: cognitive, emotional and behavioral. 

OUTCOMES 

The outcome is greater academic success for re-engaged learners. 

BASIC ASSUMPTION 

The assumption we rely on is that the more agency the learner has in the design and creation of their learning environment, the more learning will become a personal affair that they are invested in, the more engaged they will be, on a variety of levels (behavioral, emotional, cognitive) and the more successful they will be on a variety of levels as well.

HOW WE CHALLENGE AND CONTINUALLY TEST THIS ASSUMPTION  

We measure the time spent by learners customizing their avatars and environments, as well as the time spent inside the learning environment, the number of interactions with the environment (perimeter of 3D territory explored, number of clicks on interface, etc.). Through surveys and continual testing, we assess whether there is a correlation between the time invested in personalizing environments and the interest manifested by the learner. 

The 3D School Platform is powered by the open source social web-based virtual reality framework developed by the Mozilla Foundation. 

• The software foundation for our 3D social VR school relies on the customization of the open source webXR framework, Mozilla Hubs.. With Hubs Cloud, we are able to run our own custom instance of Mozilla Hubs on AWS and customize the open source framework to meet the edtech needs of the populations we serve. It is compatible with all web browsers and is accessible across all devices: smartphone, tablet, PC, mobile VR, VR. The 3D School is built on the cross-platform A-Frame framework which allows us to build 3D VR/AR experiences for the web through HTML and Entity-Component Architecture. 

Our core software framework relies on the open source social webXR framework developed by the Mozilla Foundation; Mozilla Hubs, which is built with A-Frame and licensed with the Mozilla Public License 2.0. 

Mozilla Hubs benefits from a global active Github and Discord community of developers and designers which iteratively and collaboratively builds the foundation for an open-source alternative to Facebook-sponsored social VR platforms such as Horizon. https://github.com/mozilla/hubs

The webXR API is extensively documented by the W3C in a working draft which describes support for accessing virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) devices, including sensors and head-mounted displays, on the Web. https://www.w3.org/TR/webxr/#terminology

We were founded in 2017 thanks to a grant from the Roddenberry Foundation. The Roddenberry Foundation was started by the son of Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek. As an interdisciplinary and international team of developers, designers, entrepreneurs, we embody the revolutionary values of radical inclusion which the TV series pioneered in the 1960’s. 

On our personal Starship Enterprise of a team, we currently have 5 different nationalities on board: Canadian, French, Moroccan, American, Roumanian. Everybody is coming from a different ethnic and cultural background: Asian, African, Caucasian. No one is alike and yet we are all intrinsically driven by the same ideals. We are a woman-led team in a ferociously male-dominated space: 3D, VR, gaming, tech in general. What else? 

The 3D School Platform has a SaaS business model with an annual/monthly subscription and different tiers with modular cost structures to maximize inclusion of all types of budgets. Because our objective number one is to make up for lost time during the pandemic and address the equity abyss reinforced by the sanitary crisis, it is of critical importance for us to design a business model that makes this bleeding-edge innovation accessible to all. 

Our SaaS subscription-based model per user offers different tiers based on frequency and depth of use: 

• basic: access to the avatar customizer and 3D learning world builder with pre-established assets and our professionally designed library of worlds,, 

• premium: access to the avatar customizer and 3D learning world builder with the possibility to upload one own’s assets for greater customization opportunities,,

• enterprise: for schools who want to subscribe to the platform and get customized 3D design services for us to design specific branded environments and assets, and/or organize organization-specific events (such as parent-teacher conferences in the metaverse, VR homecoming sessions). 

Expected Cost: A Flexible Cost Structure to Maximize Inclusivity and Accessibility   

The 3D School Platform has a SaaS business model with an annual/monthly subscription and different tiers with modular cost structures that depend on: 

• the number of users, 

• the frequency of use depending on the education settings in which the school has decided to harness the platform (only remote, or remote and in-person) 

• the number of features and customization options selected, 

• the type of VR-specific hardware the school would purchase, if any at all. 

The platform being hardware-agnostic, the implementation of the proposed product leaves a lot of room for freedom and adjustment to administrators and purchasing departments depending on the size of their innovation budget. 

Furthermore, schools operating on a more restricted budgets are able to harness generic pre-loaded 3D assets and still offer qualitative 3D learning experiences to their students, whereas schools with more extensive budgets can opt for a premium license which allows for the customized 3D-modeling of their physical facilities, if it is their wish to reinforce brand awareness.  

Preliminary assumptions: 

- Average public school size in the US: 526 students

- Average pupil / student ratio in the US in the public system: 16 

- Average total number of platform users: 558

- 31.7 hours delivering instruction per week / 126.8 hours per month in the US 

Scenario #1. Frugal Deployment with a Basic License 

Imagine an average-sized school running on a frugal innovation budget, that prioritizes server costs and chooses not to purchase any new hardware, nor require any customized 3D modeling services, but rather utilizes the platform with generic 3D models on existing hardware (either previously owned by the school or by students/educators themselves, the assumption being that the COVID-19 pandemic has already accelerated organizational and personal hardware acquisition). 

• Platform costs would amount to $5,157 per month for the entire school, which amounts to a $9.2 monthly investment per user. 

Scenario #2. Early VR Adopter Deployment with a Pro License  

Imagine an average-sized school running on a medium-sized innovation budget, that allows to purchase some bespoke VR hardware for a hybrid education setting, the assumption being that VR headsets can be kept at school and utilized by students whenever they are physically present on the school premises. Because their innovation budget remains fairly limited, they chose not to invest in customized 3D models, but stick to the pre-determined library of 3D assets that is included and available by subscribing to the cloud-based Platform. 

• Platform costs would amount to $5,157 per month for cloud hosting for the entire school. 

• Initial investment in hardware would ultimately vary greatly according to the type of VR headsets purchased and the ratio headset / user the school decides to opt for. For the purposes of the simulation, let us assume that the set school purchased 1 consumer-level headset for 2 users for in-person use within the physical school facility under a hybrid model (half remote + half in-person). Their initial hardware investment would then amount to $83,700 for hardware that could be relevant for up to 3 years, and last even longer. 

Scenario #3. Premium Deployment with an Enterprise License 

Imagine an average-sized school running on a large innovation budget, that allows to purchase some bespoke VR hardware for a hybrid education setting, and to require us customized 3D modeling of a digital twin of their real-world physical school facility. 

• Platform costs would amount to $5,157 per month for cloud hosting for the entire school. 

• Initial investment in hardware would ultimately vary greatly according to the type of VR headsets purchased and the ratio headset / user the school decides to opt for. For the purposes of the simulation, let us assume that the set school purchased 1 consumer-level headset for every user. Their initial hardware investment would then amount to $167,400 for hardware that could be relevant for up to 3 years, and last even longer. 

• Customized 3D modeling services would vary greatly depending on the size of the physical school facility which needs to be 3D modeled. 

Our current approach to financial sustainability is to win service contracts to governments, which we have done successfully so far. Our products are proven on the market of public service both in the USA and Europe, and already bring value and impact to the populations we serve on different continents. 

Ultimately we would like to extend our business model from B2G to both B2G and B2C: keep the government contracts for B2G and transition towards a subscription model for B2C. We are already in talks with several private for-profit schools who are interested in implementing this, so we have already started our B2C activities. 

In our B2G model, we have already received highly competitive contract-based funding from the following agencies in the past :

• Miami-Dade County Public Schools, 4th largest school district in the USA: $148,000

• The Office for Employment in the French government (“Pôle Emploi” / French Employment Office): $133,000

• The United States Institute of Peace, American federal institution tasked with promoting conflict resolution and prevention worldwide: $111,000.