A packed lecture hall seen from a student seat, around 15 avatars facing a presentation screen with nametags visible

01

Aularis

A 3D virtual lecture platform: students and instructors attend live university classes as customised avatars inside a browser-rendered auditorium.

  • Team lead · originator of the idea · sole developer
  • Graduation project
  • 2026

200

concurrent avatars in one lecture hall
Live site ↗
  • Next.js
  • React
  • Three.js
  • React Three Fiber
  • GSAP
  • NestJS
  • Prisma
  • PostgreSQL

Inside the lecture hall

Up to 200 concurrent avatars share a hall with walk-around movement and seat-based presence. Proximity spatial voice runs over WebRTC via LiveKit and self-hosted mediasoup, so who you hear depends on where you're standing. Presentations run on a virtual screen with a laser pointer and instructor moderation — mute, kick, ban.

AI during the session

Live Q&A runs during sessions. Audio is transcribed with Groq Whisper and summarised into notes with Gemini. After a session ends, the platform generates a quiz from what was covered.

  1. An in-world quiz question with four answer zones sliding into position across the lecture-hall floor
    The floor opens and answer zones slide into place.
  2. A player standing in the correct answer zone, which is highlighted as scoring
    Standing in the right zone scores.
  3. A player standing in an incorrect answer zone, which is marked as wrong
    Standing in the wrong one does not.

Architecture

An npm-workspaces monorepo split across apps/web, apps/api, apps/sfu, packages/ui and packages/shared-types. The web app deploys to Vercel; the API, database, Redis and voice infrastructure run on a Hetzner VPS. Voice transport switches between LiveKit Cloud in production and self-hosted mediasoup in development.

Reception

Rated 4.5/5 by the six people who actually used it. One team lead reports running her own sessions on it and seeing visible enthusiasm from participants. Two recurring notes — avatar art and control friction for non-gamers — aren't hidden from the case study.