A quick recap, I’m currently on my last year in computer engineering, will hopefully graduate soon. As a senior year student, I have done my final project, but it was a little bit different compared to general as far as I know so I want to share the story with you, as well as saving it for myself for later.
In my university, there are different types of final project options available for engineering students; by the way for those who don’t know, the final project is the project I need to do in order to graduate. Anyways, one of these options were about “entrepreneurship” (girişimcilik, in Turkish). To be honest, at the beginning of this year this was a word that I did not have any idea how to even pronounce. As time pass by, I learned a lot of things related to that thanks to the course.
At the beginning of this year, together with my friend Aylin from my department, we decided to take the Innovative Design and Entrepreneurship course as the final project course. Thanks to her, I found and met with other members of our group, who later become my good friends. Together with them, we started the journey of Virtual Donut.
There were many challenges ahead of us, at first we had to decide on what we will create, later we had to find potential customers and get feedback from them and create our plan. At the beginning, we had ideas related to education, health and agriculture areas but we were specifically interested in Virtual Reality technology and wanted to create something with that.
After we decide on this, which was a really hard period by the way, we decide to create a platform that works with VR and help people about language learning. We did lots of research, presentations to show our idea and lots of interviews with our potential customers and some teachers, at the end we found out that there was something wrong, or missing about this idea.
According to the feedbacks we got from mostly teachers, we changed our idea and decided to create a platform that will help people about their presentation skills instead. Our platform would be able to create realistic athmosphere for the user to do practice, wherever they want, and give feedback related to their speaking skills.
After deciding on our product, we made more interviews and finally had to decide on the name of our virtual company! This was maybe the most fun part of the journey, and we realize that deciding on something together is much more harder than we thought. At the end of many discussions, we decided on our company name as Virtual Donut and product name as ViRi!
After this part, we decided on which headset we will be using, ordered Google Cardboard Virtual Reality Headset and mostly worked on the development. For the development, we have mostly used Unity3D platform, MatLab for our voice analysis. Our product has came out to be a mobile application for Android phones which can be used together with Google Cardboard. Since development process was long, and technical, I can write a blog related to that other than this later.
We finished first demo at the end of previous semester and we currently continue working on our implementation. We have been in Trader’s Conference on our university and able to get feedback from investors. We will continue working hard till the end of the process and I hope we will be able to develop our product more 🙂
Thanks a lot for reading, I am hoping to write another blog at the end of the process to be able to look back on it. More pictures below 🙂
And at the end, thanks a lot to all of you, my teammates, for the great memories 🙂
