2017-07-24 at 22:49:55
Last Saturday the Mozilla Switzerland community, together with Liip, has organized a WebVR/A-Frame Hackathon in Lausanne, Switzerland. As always (also in Zurich), we turned to Liip for support regarding a venue, and as always they were happy to host us in Lausanne. At this point, a big "thank you" to them! Without their support we couldn't organize events as easy as we can now.
A-Frame is a framework for WebVR, making it easy to create scenes and components that can be viewed in the browser, with Cardboard, the HTC Vive and other VR devices. A-Frame even includes an Inspector that makes it easy to develop VR applications in the browser without having to test it constantly on a real VR device.
We gathered at 10 o'clock to have some initial talks and a light breakfast. It also took some time to set up the Vive and making sure we can demo A-Painter and other VR applications. At around 10:30 we started with a quick intro by Geoffroy and me. We explained the agenda and some general information about Mozilla. After that, Ben gave an intro to WebVR and how they are using A-Frame at Archilogic. It's amazing to see how it is being used in the wild for really amazing and helpful projects! Thank you for your time to come to Lausanne and present to us!
Then we did some demos with our gadgets and started hacking. With the help of Ben it was easy to create our own first projects. What struck me most is that my creativity and design skills came to end quite quickly, but nevertheless I could easily create a good Proof of Concept for a future iteration (through skilled people and Pull Requests). :)
Here are some projects that were created/started during this hackathon (click on the images to see it live in your browser):
A big "thank you" goes to Geoffroy, who has helped us out with the whole coordination with the venue and did an amazing job promoting the event to his network. We are so happy to have people like Geoffroy who are helping us keep the Open Web public and accessible to all!
Honestly, the only thing I did was the administration parts of creating event pages on the Reps portal and Meetup, coordinate for having a speaker and giving a short intro talk about the agenda (with his help). Everything about the venue, food, gadgets was organized by him. He even went as far as traveling to Zurich to get an HTC Vive so we can show case that as well!
We had a lot of fun, and we hope our attendees did too! The verbal feedback was good, however we couldn't get a lot of responses through the feedback form, even though I reminded all participants after the event through email to please fill out the feedback form. Additionally we need to do better in terms of diversity!
All photos are used with permission by Liip or their respective owners if linked to a tweet.