VR Hackathon
Northern Ireland Screen and Future Screens NI, in partnership with SideQuestVR and Digital Catapult’s Immersive Labs, invite you to join a VR Hackathon in September!
SideQuest is an open platform for distributing both experimental and commercial work for the Oculus Quest and Go headsets. To find out more about SideQuest, visit https://sidequestvr.com/.
The main theme of the hackathon will focus on touch-free solutions for a post-pandemic world, leveraging the hand tracking feature of the Oculus Quest that enables interacting in VR without physical controllers. The VR Hackathon will be free to enter and run over 7 days, from Thursday 10th September to Wednesday 16th September.
The VR Hackathon attendees will have a unique opportunity to focus on prototyping hand tracking concepts. The participants will benefit from invited talks and guidance from expert mentors who have experience in the topic and that will be able to lend their expertise to the attendees. These sessions will be hosted in a mix of Zoom, Discord and social VR to take advantage of the most widely used technologies for delivery of content.
Teams in attendance at the VR Hackathon will submit projects via SideQuestVR for consideration by the Jury. The jury, which will consist of mentors and organiser representatives, will select the best projects to be featured on the SideQuest platform.
While all level of participants are welcome, we would encourage students from universities with immersive courses and research activities, practitioners in screen-based creative industries who are interested in getting a taste of what it takes to make immersive things, immersive companies’ teams, VR enthusiasts who aspire to jump from consuming into making VR to take part in this VR Hackathon!
VR Hackathon mentors:
Antonia Forster: Antonia is a keynote speaker and self-taught programmer, working in the field of AR, VR, and haptics. Antonia has worked with a wide range of technologies, including VR (Oculus), AR (Android, AR Foundation, MARS), hand-tracking (Leap Motion), haptics (Ultraleap STRATOS Explore) and even unique location-specific projection systems (We The Curious planetarium, the UK’s only 3D 180° context projection space). Antonia works primarily in Unity/C#, and has shipped multiple enterprise-level solutions. Her experience also includes 3D modelling (Blender), Javascript, Python, and Machine Learning. Her passion lies in pushing the boundaries of XR technology, and demonstrating its use-cases.
Luca Mefisto: Luca Mefistófeles (@lucamefisto) is a seasoned Software Engineer with years of experience developing applications and experiences for the biggest energy and military corporations. He has shared his views at international universities and won several competitions, but ultimately he is just a hacker who enjoys math-rock music, making modular origami pieces and creative thinking. Luca has recently worked on hand tracking projects, including a tool with which record realistic hand-pose animations.
https://github.com/MephestoKhaan/HandPosing
Orla Harris : Orla is the COO and Co-Founder at SideQuestVR. She will guide you through the best practices on submitting projects to SideQuest.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/orlaharris/
A more detailed schedule will be emailed to the registered participants closer to the event.
Requirements to participate:
At least one team member needs to have access to a Oculus Quest headset or a Leap Motion device with a VR headset. The organisers will facilitate team formation around participants who have headsets, so it is possible to participate without one and contribute to team work e.g. with 3D asset creation, interaction design, paper prototyping, etc.
Event start: Thursday, September 10th, 4pm BST
Event end: Wednesday, September 16th, 6:30pm BST
To register, click HERE.
