Over the past couple of years, virtual reality has moved away from being just a dreamy innovation to a full-fledged technological platform. But, today most of the developers are focused only on building games to please consumers and there is little or no attention being paid to other aspects of the platform. VR no longer is meant just for recreation but has the might to become a part-&-parcel of our everyday lives in the coming years.
Thus, Virtuleap is focused on bringing together developers to now built apps for the virtual world using latest technologies such as WebVR and React JS. It is encouraging them to do so by participating in what seems to be the world’s largest WebVR hackathon. The company has launched an online event that’ll enable teams to participate in a 90-day long hackathon to develop concepts in VR completely making use of WebVR.
Speaking about the launch of the hackathon, Amir-Esmaeil Bozorgzadeh, co-founder at Virtuleap, says,
We’re on a mission to push WebVR as the priority platform for the whole industry. It’s platform agnostic, democratic, immediately accessible, and positioned where there is already an entire universe of traffic: the web.
To add to your knowledge, WebVR is a set of experimental Javascript APIs that have been developed by engineers from Google and Mozilla to provide driving support for the web to virtual reality headsets. This API can be coupled with a recently launched set of libraries — React – one of the most popular open-source projects by Facebook to build intuitive VR experiences.
Oculus has already made the first preview of the developer toolkit including React for VR, WebVR and WebGL APIs to take advantage “of functional, asynchronous, declarative programming models for building VR applications.”
The hackathon was flagged off by Virtuleap on 1st November’16 and it now wants developers to pick a category ranging from education or healthcare to finance or advertising and build their concepts for submission to a panel of highly recognised judges. The hackathon started accepting applications from 15th November’16 with the deadline for the same being 1st February’17. The submissions have already started pouring in and you can currently head to Virtuleap’s website to rate and share your feedback on each of them.
Talking about the same, Bozorgzadeh further adds,
While games and entertainment content are allowed, extra brownie points go to teams that stretch their imaginations beyond just fun experiences. We want them to think about tools, tutorials, and products, and not focus on the easier gimmicky experiences that are fleeting, convert to nothing, or have no lasting impact.
As for the winning teams, Virtuleap has partnered with StartupAmsterdam to fly them out to Europe’s first VR accelerator ‘VRBASE’ and hand out a cash prize of €30,000 for the first place. The runner-ups will also follow the former but on an adventure to Netherlands with a 3-month internship program at one of the largest VR studios in Europe, Force Field VR.
And if you’ve been thinking that the hackathon doesn’t seem impressive, wait until you hear the roster of partners who’re on board for the event. Virtuleap counts Mozilla, Google, Oculus, Samsung Internet, Microsoft among other tech giants as its prominent supporters for this massive initiative aimed at making VR apps ubiquitous. It also brings in tow partners including GitHub, VR First, Sketchfab, Rockstart, and THNK – School of Creative Leadership.
Thus, if you’ve been looking to join the virtual reality bandwagon and build applications which run natively within a browser in front of your eyes then you’re in luck. Go ahead and build one!
