LUCKNOW:
A team from Meerut Institute of Engineering and Technology 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 1,191 applications covering 25 Indian states, the team from Meerut Institute of Engineering and Technology is called ‘The Noobie Duo’ and has been founded by 8th semester students Kriti Goel and Jivesh Piplani.
The team, which has been guided by industry expert Pratham Sehgal, has built a VR game titled “Holi Molly with Gizzies”, where the players splash colours at each other during the festival of Holi. Set in a rural area, the game features a boy who has just made some new friends, named Gizzies, who have come to Earth in search of fun games. The game involves a water gun fight between them.
“My team could share ideas with industry mentors and gather feedback from this. Using this, we could take our project forward in the right way as we understood where we were lagging,”said Goel, team member, The Noobie Duo.
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 Calicut, Kottayam, Pilani, Pune and Bengaluru.
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.
