VERE360

VERE360 turns a lecture into a place you can stand inside. Rather than delivering education as slides and video, the platform is built around immersive content: 360 degree videos, 360 images and photospheres, and interactive 3D models. Tutors assemble these into classes, attach teaching material directly into the scene as notes and quiz hotspots, and either publish the class or run it live. Students join with a class code and move between a standard mobile view, a landscape view, and a full stereoscopic VR view for use with a headset, where they navigate by gaze and open the same notes and quizzes as markers floating inside the environment.

The product is not one app but four. It serves students on a mobile app, professors and tutors on a desktop panel where classes are created and taught, universities and schools on an institution panel, and a super admin on a console that manages the entire multi-tenant network of institutions, tutors, students, and shared content. Each role has a genuinely different job, and all four had to feel like one platform.

Immersive content promises to fix flat learning, but it brings its own problems, and this platform had to solve all of them at once.

Immersive content is hard to author. Tutors are educators, not 3D producers, so building a lesson out of 360 videos, photospheres, and 3D models, and attaching teaching notes and assessment to specific points inside a scene, needed to be about as approachable as making a slide deck. Teaching material also tends to get separated from the experience: if notes and quizzes live in panels outside the immersive view, students break out of the environment in order to learn, which defeats the entire point of putting them there.

A single immersive learning platform expressed as four role-based products on one shared design system.

For students, a mobile app built around joining a class with a code and then meeting the content wherever it makes sense: class slides, live classes, 360 classes, live 360 classes, 3D models with manipulable handles, and photospheres. Notes and quizzes surface as in-scene hotspots floating in the environment, so learning material stays inside the experience rather than beside it. The viewer supports portrait, landscape, and a stereoscopic split-screen VR mode with a gaze cursor for headset use, and quizzes run as clean multiple-choice sequences with question and slide progress.

Immersion only teaches if the teaching is inside it. The most consequential decision on this project was also the least visually obvious: putting notes and quizzes into the scene as hotspots rather than around it. It would have been far easier to treat the 360 content as a media element with UI wrapped around it, and the product would have looked much the same in a screenshot while being pedagogically much weaker. Immersive design is not about how much of the screen the environment fills, it is about whether the learning happens in there.

Designing for the hardest interaction mode improves the easy ones. VR with a gaze cursor removes almost everything a designer normally leans on: precise pointing, hover, small targets, dense layouts. Making hotspots and controls work under those constraints forced a simpler and more forgiving interaction model, and that simplification carried straight back into the standard mobile and landscape views. The most constrained context turned out to be the best design brief.