Mentor Reality

Web Portal Sign In
Web Portal Home [ personalized progress check, help form]
Web Portal Submit
User Flow

Inspiration

Connection is crucial for us to feel support from each other, especially in mentoring scenarios such as workshops, design springs, boot camps, as well as hackathons. However, in lots of cases, the mentoring process encounters challenges due to the large amount of attendees, complex event structures, and multi-channel communication. These difficulties might cause inefficiency in mentoring because extra cognitive/workload is required for mentors in sourcing and digesting information and navigating to the teams and their problems. This slower reviewing and mentoring process will finally result in fewer mentorship opportunities and capability for teams who need help forming and building innovative ideas and solutions. We take MIT Reality Hack as a unique opportunity for us to build Mentor Reality, a Mixed Reality + Web app mentorship solution for collaborative events, innovative institutions, and other mentorship scenarios to help boost innovation by creating a connective and supportive mentorship process.

What it does

Mentor Reality is a mixed reality tool developed for the Meta Quest 3 to facilitate the connection between mentors and teams at hackathons in need of assistance. Through the team web portal, teams can submit their requests via tickets, and mentors will receive notifications directly on their headsets to locate and address these requests. Our solution introduces a controller-free hand tracking system with an interactive sphere that visualizes team requests, guiding mentors seamlessly to the teams in need.

Before the hackathon begins, organizers visit each table and spawn a spatial anchor in the form of a glowing ball. This becomes the primary means of communication between mentors and teams, emitting different colors depending on the team's status. Throughout the hackathon, teams can use the web portal by submitting their team number to sign in, granting access to their personalized checklist, which event organizers can customize according to their preferences. To the right of the personal checklist is the help request form, where teams can initiate one by clicking "create a help ticket." The form prompts users to specify their request type, the hardware they're using, and a description of their problem.

After submission, the sphere located at the corresponding table will change from purple (idle state) to red (problem state), indicating the active status of the help request.

Because hacking rooms can be vast and crowded, an additional feature we added is the map feature, allowing mentors to quickly locate the table if it is in a different room. Additionally, the red status ball contrasts significantly with the purple idle ball, making it easy to find in a room.

Once the mentor reaches the table, they can tap the red floating ball to get a summary of the team's help request. From there, the ball will turn yellow, signaling active assistance by mentors.

If they can resolve the problem, the mentor can click the "solved" button, and the ball will turn green for a few seconds before returning to the purple idle state. However, if the mentor needs others to take a look, they can press "place back," and the ball will return to the table, turning red.

An additional interaction we added to foster mentor and team connections is the "like" system. While wearing the headset, mentors can give a real-life thumbs up, adding 1 like to the team's portal.

With our system and web portal, we can easily assist mentors and teams in ensuring their project is on the right track!

How we built it

We built this in Unity, Figma, and with the Meta presence platform, node.js, and HTML/CSS.

Challenges we ran into

Our two biggest challenges were lack of experience and time. None of us had any prior experience in web servers and using the Meta 3! Time was another challenge as the development time flew by everyday!