The world's biggest WebVR hackathon – Virtuleap – kicked off on Thursday of last week. Before we talk about the hackathon, let's discuss why it's an exciting time for this technology…
WebVR is exploding on a number of fronts, most of which relate to the industry as a whole, while one is a little more Autodesk-centric.
- Oculus recently announced support for WebVR – and a new ReactVR framework – in their Carmel browser
- It was announced a whole month ago – which seems like ages, these days – but this is a significant milestone
- Google is launching WebVR support for Android Chrome in January
- This is a big deal: a large number of smartphones will soon have WebVR support by default
- WebVR is progressing steadily towards being a ratified W3C standard
- There's lots of great content online from the recent W3C Workshop on Web & Virtual Reality, which gives a great feel for this progress (many thanks to Giorgio Mazzucchelli for thinking to share this link)
- The version of the Forge Viewer currently in staging (v2.12) is the first to support WebVR properly
- If you load the WebVR extension in your code, you'll get a VR button show up when a WebVR-compatible HMD (e.g. HTC Vive, Oculus Rift) is connected, or the page is loaded on a Google Cardboard-/Daydream VR-capable smartphone
- There's still some work needed to get the viewer to support "widget viewing" – à la Vrok It – but it's a solid start
Anyway, on to the hackathon. This is an interesting event with some serious incentives for participating.
- The top prize is € 30K with a spot in a 6-month Amsterdam-based VR accelerator
- As a 90-day hackathon the submission deadline – February 1st – is still a ways off, so you have time to put together something really interesting
- It's a completely online event, so you can collaborate with like-minded individuals around the world
I see a few familiar faces on the list of judges, so I have no doubt the event will be managed professionally and lead to some really interesting projects being born.
So… if you're interested in building a team that uses the Forge Viewer to create a submission for this hackathon, please submit a comment to this post: if you're looking for teammates then I can certainly help you get connected. I'd also be very happy to informally advise teams that choose to go down this path (who knows – I may even want to join one, if the idea's compelling enough :-).
Happy hacking!
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