WebVR at Navrachana University
Date: 15 & 16 Feb, 2019
Venue: Navrachana University, Vadodara
Another week, another talk!
It was summed up pretty well by Harshil Agarwal — a Volunteer for this event, yet another talk. It was something newbie friendly which makes it easier for young developers to understand A-Frame with WebVR. I love to see how students react to what a single line of a JavaScript API can do to your common HTML code.
I have given a few of these in the past so getting the pace up wasn’t an issue. We started and they were all so quiet and I feared if the talk would go too monotonous. It’s a common theme in a casual lecture as well, where the kids would simply go off to sleep if a person simply keeps talking, I know I have. :P
Which is why I added Music to the mix, and a lot of them simply dug my playlist, really. Either that or they were just singing out of anger, no, THEY DID! Which really set the mood for hacking! Once we got past what Mozilla does, what’s A-Frame, VR and AR, we really dug deep into the theory! I just wasn’t sure of their practical skills yet, which is why I gave them a basic excercise to complete, write your initials with the basic shapes and objects!
I know it’s not something too hard to do, it’s just something too hard to master, really. Most of us can do it in a 2D Space, on the X-and-Y axis, but doing it in 3D is the tricky part. To move further ahead with A-Frame, that’s what they need to master, I feel, objects and elements in 3D Space. I have to say that the work they did was good, especially for the letter ‘S’, and the work around with the Torus Knot.
We broke for Lunch after the basic exercises, and moved on to GitHub. I feel it’s important for students today to understand Git and GitHub. Harshil Agarwal went into it, and helped them make Pull Requests and we helped students make those and understand what they have been doing. He passed on the mic to Pratik Parmar who explained Texture, Images, Entities and Components. It’s important for volunteers to step up and speak when time arrives, so that they can handle things in our absence. It’s fun working with these two Volunteers.
All in all, it’s been a regular, fun and a slightly different workshop than the most I’ve spoken at, about A-Frame. You can check what the participants made, here: https://github.com/pransh15/WebVR-Navrachana
I’ll upload the pictures of me presenting the best scene an A-Frame t-shirt later, it isn’t with me yet. It wasn’t just him who got felicitated there, I was honored to have received a memento as well. Thank you to Navrachana University for hosting me and my team.
