VisitUPT, a 3D online game created by students

VisitUPT, a 3D online game created by students

Online learning seems to have inspired some of the students of Politehnica University Timișoara, who created a unique application among Romanian universities - VisitUPT, a 3D game that runs in web browsers at: https://visit.upt.ro/. The game was built by two students from the Faculty of Automation and Computers, Raul Brumar and Mihai-Alexandru Grosu (also constituting their bachelor's thesis, marked with 10), under the coordination of assist. Ph.D. student eng. Stelian Nicola, and for the realization of some models in the game, such as the amphitheaters or the Experimentarium, help was received by collaborating with the Faculty of Architecture and City Planning.

The project started at the beginning of 2021, at the initiative of the Career Counseling and Guidance Center and the management of the university, but the project required the involvement of all faculties in UPT. It took hundreds of hours of work, writing thousands of lines of code, adapting to the requirements of all faculties, a huge amount of work, especially for optimizing applications. Due to the pandemic, the project meetings took place mostly on Zoom.

The purpose of the game was to welcome the future students of Politehnica University Timisoara, who this year could not come to visit, due to the pandemic. Users of the game can find out information about each faculty that interests them, being able to visit the laboratories of the faculties and view the main equipment. At the same time, they can interact with the characters in the game, being able to ask them different questions related to the subjects studied, the facilities of the UPT student or their future career.

The most spectacular part of the game is the Experimentarium. In this place, users are challenged to several games and applications in which their observational spirit and logic are tested. The activities that users can perform include a system with different sensors, LEDs, microcontrollers, creating a pseudocode program for the aforementioned system and combining substances to obtain a chemical reaction.

At the beginning of the development of VisitUPT, a market study was carried out to see what similar apps exist. Comparable applications that allow you to explore places virtually are: Google Arts & Culture, Virtouroso and YouVisit.

In the future, the team that made the game aims to develop it for mobile phones with Android and iOS, but also to expand the virtual space of the university campus by adding several 3D models of UPT buildings. At the same time, they plan to develop a version of the game that for VR glasses. The expansion of applications and games within the Experimentarium is another direction of VisitUPT game development.