Computer Science News
UCL Students win Google Firebase Hackathon
A team of four UCL Computer Science students - Tobias Büschel (MSc Computer Scienc), Kimeshan Naidoo (MSc Computer Science), Jia Shern Tan (BEng Mechanical Engineering) and Edward Mothershaw (MSc Computer Science) has won the third annual "Static Showdown" competition presented by Google Firebase. 40 teams and about a hundred people from around the world competed.
Static Showdown is a worldwide virtual competition where teams of up to four have 48 hours to build a web app - with one catch: entries must be built without any custom server-side code. That means 100% HTML, JS, CSS and off-the-shelf back-end services like the Firebase Database.
The winning app
Nibbl VR Tour allows you to travel in Virtual Reality through Google Street View.
Have you ever wanted to visit somewhere but never found the time? Now you can with Nibbl VR Tour! Nibbl gives its users the ability to visit their dream destinations in virtual reality in the comfort of their own living rooms. It is crrently supporting tours all the way from San Francisco to Singapore.
The idea behind the app is simple. Virtual reality is becoming more accessible and popular among consumers and the developer community is growing daily. However, the team realized that Google's popular Cardboard does not yet provide developers with an option to easily develop web apps using a JavaScript SDK and subsequently deploying them to mobile devices using PhoneGap. Thus, we wanted to create an application that showcases the possibility of creating such a virtual reality application in a browser; one that works seamlessly on different devices and could be deployed as a native app. The result is a simple app that allows you to travel your favourite routes and explore new cities in virtual reality.
Technologies used
AngularJS, HTML 5, CSS3, JavaScript, Bower, NPM, Grunt, and Firebase.