KOCHI:
Two teams from engineering colleges in Kerala will be making presentations at the Facebook School of Innovation’s Virtual Reality Demo Day in Bengaluru, where they will compete against students from other cities in a contest of emerging technologies’ products.
The programme, to be held on February 23, has been co-created by Facebook and Startup Village Collective (SV.CO). Under this initiative, 21 students from all over India will get an opportunity to exhibit their talent through prototypes designed using Virtual Reality.
Selected from a pool of nearly 2,000 applications covering 25 Indian states, the teams from Kerala who have made it to the top 10 are ‘Adam Games’ from NIT Calicut, and ‘Radiant’ from Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Technology, Kottayam.
The team Adam games has been founded by Christo Kurian, Ashik Abdul Hameed and Muhammed Favas, who are NIT Calicut students. Under the mentorship of industry expert Sharat Chandra, their team has developed a VR game titled “Farm Lord”, which allows users to experience farming by playing a fun and challenging game.
The Radiant team, which has been guided by industry expert Shubham Agarwal, has built a VR game called “Bird’s Eye View”, which will allow users to virtually fly a plane across India and get a panoramic view of various monuments. The team has been founded by Anaj Antony, Kamal Johnson and Mashal Maliyakkal from the Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Technology.
As part of their preparation of the VR Day, which will be attended by industry leaders, vice-chancellors and state startup missions, both the teams have been working for the past six months in building their Virtual Reality applications. They will be competing against 8 other national teams, who hail from Bengaluru, Meerut, Pilani, Pune and Ghaziabad.
“We have worked hard for six months and will put in our best performance at the national VR Day. This is a great opportunity for us to learn from the industry and present our work to the Facebook team and the best in the industry,” said Hameed, team member, Adam Games.
The purpose of the VR program, built in collaboration with industry partners Scapic and Unity, is to impart key skills required to build a world-class VR prototypes. Out of the top 10 teams, a panel comprising of an industry expert and Facebook India team will select the best team, the Winner of India VR Day, on February 23 in Bengaluru.
Launched in December 2017, the Facebook School of Innovation Programme is designed with an objective to give industry exposure to engineering students in India in emerging technologies and help them to build their ideas into next-generation, globally marketable products and services.
