After several weeks of design, development, prototyping, and playtesting, we saw amazing student projects from all over the world! Thank you to all who participated!

In November, we challenged student creators to come together and show the world what you could do. The development and growth of the projects in this competition really proved that anything is possible. Every week brought excitement as more and more students joined the competition and works in progress were shared by everyone. The judges were equally impressed with all the projects, saying that the submissions to this challenge were much harder to judge than other competitions they’ve judged!

As the competition has come to a close, everyone should recognize they are winners in their own way. The true value of challenges is how far you can push yourself and what you discover along the way. While we tasked you with teaching people something new, we hope that this journey enabled you to learn something new for yourself.

On to the projects that impressed us the most!

Community’s Choice

“A fun perspective on understanding the size of dinosaurs – loved the creativity of the underwater viewing area!” – Ashley Alicea, Unity Evangelist

Definitely deserving of the crowd favorite, Dinosaur Museum brought together some really great aspects of VR as a whole, enabling people to interact with dinosaurs in a virtual space. The Brontosaurus, velociraptors, and a myriad of other creatures roam the museums, allowing the player to experience them in real time.

Watching the progress of Dinosaur Museum from its inception was a real joy to watch. From the inspiration to the modeling of the museum to the incorporation of VR and dinosaur models, every week there was a new update, which always made it interesting to see what came next.

Best Overall

“Gorgeous presentation and excellent interface. The backgrounds and audio are beautiful. I can see this as a commercial product.” – MoJen Jenkins, Founder of The Noisemakers

This project really made an impact across all the submissions – it made great use of a simple concept to build upon and brought everything together to create a complete experience that looks great.

Using various features like Cinemachine and post processing to create great environmental effects really pulls you into the experience. The high definition really captures reflections from the environment and the pottery itself. In addition, it really helped to visualize the act of creating pottery, even highlighting the history that inspired it.

Honorable Mentions

“I love that the game mechanics instantiate the learning objectives. Well done!” – Jennifer Javornik, Vice President of Sales at Filament Games

This project leveraged the different features of Unity to help make this an immersive interactive story that showcases a well-planned narrative of environmental issues. Stemming from real issues around the world, Never-ending set out to have the player take action, highlighting the ways that we can protect the environment. Using their abilities as artists, in addition to internal tools and external assets, they created environments with high visual quality to help players imagine the circumstances of the character.

“This is a great innovative approach to a classic problem.” – Aurore Dimoupoulos, Unity Content Team Producer

This game definitely brought a different take on the challenges of language learning but really enabled the concept of “Practice makes Perfect.” By leveraging features from IBM Watson, the team wanted to immerse the player in a world where they have to practice and learn from characters that really interact with them. Learning a language definitely requires practice and reinforcement, and by creating an experience that really lets you speak, players are better able to make progress.

“I’m blown away by the fantastic execution and clear vision for this experience!” – Ashley Alicea, Unity Evangelist

The interactivity of creating DNA sequences really helps to conceptualize how the process works. The presentation of the entire environment as well as the use of leap motions for controls really helped make this project shine! The research behind the project lends itself well to players being able to interact with sequences and learning how to construct strands through puzzles.

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And these are just a handful of the amazing projects that students made with Unity! As a small shout out, show support for the student team behind The Voice Inside – now going live on Steam following the challenge! It’s amazing to see that people are already starting to take their projects to greater heights! Check out all the projects on the Global Student Challenge page on Connect and leave feedback for the teams, and see all the challenges we’re running!

If you’re interested in more upcoming challenges, check out The Rookies, where we’ll be supporting creators of digital arts and media from all over the world!