Oculus Launch Pad Grad Lara Bucarey Shares the Development Process Behind Language Learning App ‘Vernacular’

Each year, Oculus Launch Pad supports promising VR content creators from diverse backgrounds as they iterate on their unique ideas and bring them to market.

We’re kicking off a series of Q&As with our Oculus Launch Pad program graduates to showcase their talents and efforts throughout the program and beyond.

2020 Launch Pad grant recipient Lara Bucarey spoke with us about her involvement with Oculus Launch Pad and how it helped shape her career and the development of Vernacular⁠, an immersive language learning experience that transports travelers to cities across the world and promotes cultural awareness.

Thank you! The Launch Pad experience was really incredible: it brought together a diverse group of metaverse developers to create, learn, and grow in the industry together with the support of the Oculus team. In addition to making lifelong friends and gaining invaluable insight from legendary Meta advisors, the most incredible part of the journey was meeting my team. Alongside fellow Launch Pad participants William Cram and Joshua Angeley, we joined forces with Krishan Rajaratnam and Christopher Toppino to create a prototype of our immersive language learning experience, Vernacular, which ultimately won an OLP grant and allowed us to produce a Quest 2 optimized application. Vernacular has long been a dream of mine, so the fact that I get to be game director and lead game designer on this app every day, I can’t imagine a better career. I’m forever grateful to my team for helping me bring it to life.

The reason I took a leap into the VR industry in 2017 was due to the power of immersion, particularly for education. The best way to learn a new language is through total immersion - so what better way to learn than through VR? After an encouraging conversation I had during Oculus Launch Pad with Meta’s Content Launch Manager Bruce Wooden, I knew it was time to finally produce the immersive language learning app that I had been designing.

After studying neuroscience at the University of Rochester where I learned how we as humans essentially learn: speech formation, perception, memory, recall, the tenets of cognitive behavior; I became a certified Teacher of English as a Second Language. I taught for over a decade in addition to being a home study teacher for five years, and my approach toteaching was directly influenced by my research in order to foster more successful, and as a result, happier students.

One of my students, and one of the main inspirations for Vernacular, was a 60 year old Indian woman who was trying to learn English. She was told that she was too old to learn and that if she hadn’t learned by now she never would. But she ignored and overcame those myths - and did even better than just learning the language - she became fluent! Every week she gained more confidence and she was glowing as her English literacy skills became stronger. Reciprocally, she would teach me about her customs and even used to cook for me when I gave a lesson - kind of like the old woman who paid The Wedding Singer in meatballs - and every week I learned more about her culture. It was this experience, exchange, and connection that was really the ignition for Vernacular - I wanted to find a way to bring the empowerment of language learning and appreciation for other people’s cultures on a mass scale. The potential to share language and culture is possible in VR and its potential to build bridges in the real world is exponential.

What makes our app unique is that we are working with AI inside virtual reality. You, as the player, actually speak to characters and they speak back to you. Working with speech recognition models, servers, and a customized framework requires its own set of technical feats.

Additionally, our team is especially mindful of unique considerations in order to make the experience more culturally authentic for players. One consideration we made was adding colliders of a certain distance between NPCs inside our virtual Japanese city to accurately reflect the personal space strangers keep in a real Japanese city. We also worked with consultants and natives of Japan to ensure that not only the language but also the culture is as genuine as possible.

For the Japanese module of Vernacular, we were inspired by mid-size Japanese cities. We wanted to avoid the uncanny valley and to make our environment and characters approachable. Players are already encountering real-world scenarios which their brain perceives as real, so we didn’t want to intensify gameplay or create uncomfortability with a hyper realistic environment or characters, which could in turn, create a barrier in the brain’s ability to learn more easily. We are also focused on performance, particularly with our AI integration, so everything in the environment supports that functionality. We are looking to give the app a makeover in the near future to create a more unique aesthetic that also supports our latest additions to the experience’s narrative.

The small daily game development decisions you make can often have a large impact. Design and make the changes you want to see in the industry. Make those daily decisions to support diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility within your game - be aware of industry standards and go beyond them. Listen to diverse voices and perspectives and QA your app with a large and diverse audience. The best way to gain a new perspective is by understanding the perspective of others.

The biggest design challenge for me was also the most rewarding: transposing my real world language learning lessons to virtual reality. Could I take my experiences in teaching, feed it into a virtual system and yield the same, real world outcomes? Absolutely. I feel like everything up until that moment had prepared me for the opportunity. My background in cognitive learning. Over 10 years experience as a certified language learning teacher. My passion to travel and learn about new cultures. My love of games and immersive experiences. My role as an XR project manager for The World Bank’s education experiences. And finally my career as an award-winning XR producer. All of my one-of-a-kind experiences prepared me to create impactful choices for Vernacular’s one-of-a-kind game design.

You know that warning on side mirrors: “objects in mirror are closer than they appear”? Well, the same goes for VR. What you run in the engine doesn’t always have the same effect in the headset. For example, one of our cat cafe barista’s seemingly harmless slicing of lemons for tea, came across like a violent fruit-slaughter in headset!

Besides having a better feel for characters, there is an infinite amount of things to learn from playtesting. For example, what might seem easy to you might not be an intuitive UI to someone else. Or making sure that your app is as accessible as it can be. Just observing how people move within the space - seeing how they interact - playtesting is imperative to agile development. I recommend playtesting often and with a wide variety of folks to yield the best outcomes.

Choose what platform you want to build on: Unity, Unreal, even Meta’s Horizon. Then look into educational resources for them - many platforms provide their own. Then find their user community such as in online forums, YouTube tutorials, Udemy classes, etc..

Don’t get discouraged. There will be a lot of challenges as you continue your development journey, each is a learning opportunity. Be kind and connect with others - always remember you’re a part of a unique community of creators building the future - and it never hurts to give a leg up to those folks who you think deserve it.