Second Prize in the NYC WebVR Hackathon!

From Friday June 23rd to Sunday June 25th I participated in the second annual NYC WebVR hackaton hosted by Sketchfab and Hugh Seaton. With my team of Thomas Van Bouwel, Sam Spaeth, and Maxwell Foxman, we had 36 hours to design and build a compelling WebVR application from scratch.

We decided to create a compelling 'classroom' WebVR experience that would allow users to simply go to a web link and find themselves in a multi-user VR classroom. At first we tried to implement the Altspace SDK to take advantage of their existing infrastructure, but a key component of our vision was that the room's 'teacher' would have speaking privileges and control when the 'students' could talk (they'd be muted by default). 

So instead, we built the multi-user system ourselves using a number of technologies including Aframe and WebRTC. In the end we had a beautiful little campfire  scenario with the following setup:

• First person to go to the link is the 'teacher'
• Everyone else who comes in may select their seat and hear the teacher but they are muted.
• If someone would like to speak, they click on the question mark above the campfire, which alerts the teacher, who can then give (and revoke) speaking privileges.

Here's Sketchfab's write-up on the event featuring a very surly photo of yours truly:
https://blog.sketchfab.com/sketchfab-hosts-webvr-hackathon/

Here's the WebVR experience:
http://afterclass.glitch.me/

Here's more information on the development:
https://devpost.com/software/afterclassvr

We hope the WebVR community builds upon what we started and finds ample opportunity to implement this.

-Alex