Can You Hack Virtual Reality Better Than a 14-Year-Old?
Dozens spent a recent weekend coding furiously at a Samsung VR hackathon; they were bested by a teen.
Hack Reality: we’ll bring the headsets, you bring the big ideas,” read the invitation to Samsung Research America in Silicon Valley. 120 entrepreneurs answered that call, grabbed a Gear VR, and spent a recent weekend coding furiously.
By 2 p.m. on Sunday, a once-pristine cafe was a sea of cables, soda cans, abandoned plates of Korean food, and half-crunched apples. Despite copious amounts of extra-strength, cold-brew coffee, everyone looked exhausted; 70 participants completed projects in record time.
“We do days like today without specific targets set for the entrepreneurs and their projects,” said John Rodkin, managing director of San Francisco’s Samsung Accelerator and one of the event’s judges. “Of course we do set targets for ourselves, namely the caliber of the attendees and the exposure to our platforms, with extra credit if we find ideas we can fund or people we can hire. But if you set a target for the projects themselves it can undermine the creative thinking. We just want to see what happens.”
Stephanie Hawn, a member of GeekGirlCon (and an interaction designer at HBO by day), had traveled from Seattle for the hackathon event.
“I came here by myself, wanted to network and have an awesome time, without a specific idea, on purpose, so I could join up with others to see what happened,” she told PCMag. “I found six other coders and we became the ‘Magic Cool Bus’ team. I just recently got certified in development for Unity3D, which we’re using to code our idea today. The Magic Cool Bus is an educational VR platform: you’re in a bus and go on a field trip to Mars.”
Julie Delbuck, Samsung Accelerator’s community manager, was on hand to give guidance to teams and saw the event as a way to bring geeks into the Samsung Gear family. “I’m happy to bring all these incredible talented people into our sphere, and I hope they continue to come to our events and keep working on their projects, because I see a lot of potential here,” she said.
It wasn’t just Samsung executives roaming the hackathon; there were also industry expert judges, including Shauna Heller, founder of Clay Park VR, formerly of Facebook-owned Oculus.
“There’s a lot of riffing on themes that others have been working on at other hackathons I’ve been at,” said Heller. “Like exchanging photos or doing virtual tours, and there’s clearly a lot of interest in incorporating art, taking real art pieces and turning them into a multidimensional medium that you can walk through and explore.
“Something I’m looking for today, from my time at Oculus, is the ability to bring a networked multi-user experience into mobile or PC VR,” Heller said. “It’s a lot of complex architecture on the back-end to make that real, but it’s come a long way and has a lot of potential.”
Finally it was time. Everyone was ordered to stop work and judges inched their way between tables to interview the teams in order to narrow it down to about 10 final teams with reality-busting concepts.
Categories included: best industry-specific application (health, construction, real estate, and so on), best tool for UGC or game development, most original/inventive UX, best multi-user application, and (the ultimate prize) Best in Show.
Victors received a sleek James Bond-style briefcase of electronic goodies from Samsung and partners, including Gear VR, a year’s access to Unity Pro, and a Galaxy S7 Edge. They also now have the chance to win a seat at the Samsung Accelerator and a meeting with a VR investor, though that’s not guaranteed.
As the shortlist was announced, the teams rushed to get prepped for the pitch round. Some who didn’t make the cut moved to leave, but most stayed around to lend their support.
Each finalist then delivered a rapid-fire pitch and, as these were VR projects, the judges slipped on VR headsets and we saw a projection from inside their eyeline view, which was great.
Stephanie Hawn’s “Magic Cool Bus” team won in the industry-specific category for education. Other projects worth highlighting included an app for the colorblind, which re-formats problematic red/green into other shades that can be detected. “Honey I Shrunk The Cube” is an innovative teaching tool to explain orders of magnitude; once inside the VR world, users get a firsthand feel for what it is like to be reduced in size, which could be useful in examining cellular structures.
The last pitch finalist, Anish Singhani, couldn’t really see over the podium because he’s all of 14 years old. “How many people have been to more hackathons than they are years old?” Samsung’s John Rodkin joked.
But as the teen whipped through his presentation, any skepticism vanished. His project, “VRtual Expo,” is a solution for organizers and attendees to participate in conferences via VR. This was no gimmick. He’d thought about how you code real-time multi-user interactions, as well as pick up digital conference handouts and see them automatically uploaded to your virtual drive.
The judges had their headsets on and we saw them move through the 3D conference space and every single aspect of the project worked perfectly. So it’s no surprise that Singhani won Best In Show.
“Anish is a very talented 14-year-old who tried to incorporate as many technologies into his concept and executed it brilliantly,” said Leo Chang, principal at Samsung Accelerator and one of the judges, about why they selected him even though he’s too young to join the Samsung Accelerator.
As the Samsung Research Cafe emptied out, we looked around to interview Singhani himself, but he was nowhere to be found. Apparently, his dad had already whisked him home; it was getting late.
Read more: “Creating a VR TV Series Is No Easy Task”
Originally published at //www.pcmag.com/news/349958/can-you-hack-virtual-reality-better-than-a-14-year-old.
