USC’s Creating Reality hackathon tackles AR/VR projects starting March 12

Don’t be surprised if you’re strolling by the University of Southern California campus and you see see 400 people decked out in virtual reality headsets next week. The university is hosting Creating Reality, its first VR/AR hackathon. It’s a four-day event that’s sponsored by USC, Intel, Microsoft, AT&T, and HP. It will run from March 12 to March 15, and a panel of judges will hand out awards for select projects on the final day.

Creating Reality’s participants are a mix of students and industry professionals chosen from a pool of over 1,000 applicants. Workshops about various aspects of VR and AR will kick off the event, and then folks will split up into teams. They’ll have two days to prototype and develop their projects, which will be judged on March 15. Once the event is over, everything will be uploaded onto the development platform GitHub and the software engineering career site Devpost.