In the past year, I have been teaching Tinkercad for teaching students online electronics. But I like to have a tool like Blender to do similar things in 3D.
A few requirements:
Interactive real-time support. Meaning, the “teacher” should be able to manipulate the 3d model of the student in real-time.
The teacher should have an overview of progress in the class.
Students do not need to download any additional the software
No need for special hardware (maybe a good graphics card you be better) like VR headset.
If we can develop a good working setup, this would be very beneficial for many people.
Anyone knows if there is a group inside the Blender community working on something similar already?
I’m also a teacher and I think those requirements are not a necessity, but I understand your point, however IMHO Blender cannot be compared with TinkerCAD or Mecabricks.
Your idea may ease some things, however Blender is a high performance high quality digital content creation tool (a DCC) no DCC like blender would work on a browser, unless you use something like a remote machine that you access via browser.
That can be done in many ways, but it’s a realitively complex infraestructure that has to be assembled.
Regarding the other requirements, they lie in the virtual classroom part of the class, and that could be fullfilled in many ways, because with Blender you probably need more than just the tool, like some texture editing software (gimp/krita) or some reference or sequence reviewing tool (DJV) and those don’t work in the browser either.
So I would say that to use Blender you can invest in an infraestructure with remote machines for the students (with Google machines or AWS machines for example) or just go ahead as we do, satellite tools like Teams, Discord or Zoom, and everyone installs Blender on their computer
I think that a simplified version of Blender that can be executed within a browser would require a ton of work and would be way less powerful in the end, not worth the effort when Blender can be installed in computers from 10 years ago I think (or 7, not sure), and if required, older versions can be installed and still be perfectly functional for the students
Thanks for reaction and your feed back.If you have some time. Take a look at how simple and fast Mecabriks works in a browser. Something that simple would be a great teaching tool.
I know mecabricks, but in its simplicity lies it’s limitation, that’s what I mean.
To make blender browser usable without using a remote virtual machine I think it would require a ton of work, changes in practically every part of the software.
I understand your point and your idea, but I think it’s not properly feasible with Blender.
