Why are the avatars walking in slow motion in the Koala Go Playground?

Slow-motion avatars in the Playground are almost always a rendering performance issue, not an avatar setting — there is no "avatar speed" slider in Koala Go. The Playground runs a 3D scene in the browser using WebGL, and when the device or browser can't keep up with the frame rate, avatars look like they're wading through molasses. The fastest fix, in most cases, is to lower the Playground Quality setting to Low. That single change drops the rendering cost enough for most laptops and Chromebooks to hit a smooth frame rate, and avatar motion returns to normal.

How to change the Playground Quality setting

1. Open the Koala Go classroom in your browser.
2. Click the ☰ menu in the top right of the screen.
3. Open Settings.
4. Scroll to the Playground section.
5. Under Quality, choose Low (square blocks + no shadows).
6. You'll see a prompt to restart the Playground for the change to take effect. Restart it.

The setting is saved per teacher account, so you only need to do this once.

What the four quality levels actually change

Quality controls how detailed the scene looks. It does not change the gameplay, the activities available, or what your students can do — only how the scene is rendered.

• Low — square blocks, no shadows. Cheapest to render. Best for older laptops, Chromebooks, lower-end Windows machines, and any device where avatars look choppy.
• Medium — square blocks, shadows on.
• High — rounded blocks, shadows on.
• Ultra — rounder blocks, shadows on. Most expensive to render. Best on a recent Mac, a desktop with a dedicated GPU, or a high-end gaming laptop.

If you're not sure where your device falls, start at Low and step up one level at a time. Stay at the highest level that still feels smooth.

If Low quality didn't fix it

The second most common cause is that hardware acceleration is turned off in your browser. It's normally on by default, but extensions, profile resets, or older driver updates sometimes flip it off.

In Chrome: paste chrome://settings/system into the address bar, toggle on "Use hardware acceleration when available", then restart Chrome completely (close every window, not just the tab).

Other things worth checking, in order:

• Close other heavy tabs. Video calls, Google Docs with lots of comments, and other 3D sites all compete for the GPU.
• Update your browser. WebGL performance improvements ship in most major Chrome and Edge updates.
• Plug in your laptop. Many laptops throttle the GPU aggressively on battery, which shows up as slow-motion 3D.
• Restart the browser. Long-running Chrome sessions accumulate memory and slow down WebGL.

If it's still slow after all of that

If avatars still look slow after dropping to Low quality, turning on hardware acceleration, and restarting the browser, the device may be below what the Playground can reliably render. Write to koala@teachwithkoala.com with: the device model, the browser and version, and what the quality setting is currently on. That's enough for the team to confirm whether it's a device-class issue or something else worth investigating.

A quick note on what "Playground" is

The Playground is the 3D environment inside the Koala Go virtual classroom — the shared world where avatars walk around, pick up gems, and interact with objects you've placed in the scene. It runs in the browser; there is no separate app to install. The Playground is a feature of Koala Go (the current, web-based product). It is not related to the legacy Koala 3D desktop app, which was discontinued in October 2023.