Hackathons are events where people engage in rapid and collaborative engineering over a short period of time. They facilitate interdisciplinary work by grouping people with different skills in order to solve a particular challenge. The goal is to provide a working product by the end of the event, and to award the best solution.
This hackathon, organized within the first XR Camp of the EU project Realities in Transition, aims to engage young students in critical thinking about Extended Realities. By learning the basics of HTML code and JavaScript snippets, and with the use of Artificial Intelligence tools, they can design virtual environments and host them for their own use. At the same time, these new skills help them reflect on issues like energy consumption, privacy, open culture, digital representation, and accessibility.
During three consecutive days, around thirty students from the School of Applied Arts and Design in Zagreb put their skills to work to create a working prototype of a virtual scene with A-Frame, an open-source library for building 3D spaces easily on the browser.
The hackathon is organized in partnership with the School of Applied Arts and Design in Zagreb and UBU – The Association of Former Students of the School of Applied Arts and Design in Zagreb.