JAIPUR:
In the midst of a plethora of cricket games that are available online, two students from the Pilani campus of the prestigious Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS) have designed and developed the prototype of a Virtual Reality (VR) game which takes you on the exhilarating journey of a street cricket player becoming successful and famous.
The students – Mayank Bhutani and Koustubh Gupta – will demonstrate the prototype of their innovative product at the Facebook School of Innovation’s Virtual Reality Demo Day in Bengaluru on Saturday (February 23), where he is to compete against students from various cities in a contest of emerging technologies’ products. It will be attended by industry leaders, vice-chancellors and various state startup missions.
Under the programme, co-created by Facebook and Startup Village Collective (SV.CO), India’s first digital incubator for college entrepreneurs, 21 students from all over India will exhibit the prototypes of their products that have been developed using VR. Out of the top 10 teams, a panel comprising an industry expert and Facebook India team will select the best team as the Winner of India VR Day.
The purpose of the VR programme, built in collaboration with industry partners Scapic and Unity, is to impart key skills required to build a world-class VR prototypes while equipping students to build their own startup or pursue masters in areas of emerging technologies.
Mayank and Koustubh, who are doing internships at the BITS Pilani, have developed the fascinating game under the mentorship of industry expert Sanket Thakur, who is founder of Cave (Centre of VR/AR Excellence).
Some specific features of the game, entitled Bails Down, include rotating the controller to control the movement of the bat; pressing the trigger button to throw balls; and swinging the bat to hit the ball. There is no need to click any button and one can see the score for the current ball, total score and overs.
The game has been selected from a pool of 1191 applications received from 25 Indian states. As part of the preparation for the demonstration, the participating students underwent a six-month developer-training programme under the mentorship of well-known experts in emerging technologies.
The BITS team will be competing against nine national teams hailing from Bengaluru, Meerut, Kozhikode, Kottayam, Pune and Ghaziabad.
“The industry mentors taught us how to make our VR game industry ready by improving graphics, building a storyline and most importantly to prioritize what to build and what to avoid” they said.
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. It has also conducted a series of workshops for nearly 5,000 students across the country to spread awareness in the emerging field of Virtual Reality.
