What I Learned At StartApp’s VR Hackathon




Jenny Chen writes about her experiences at StartApp’s 24-hour hackathon in virtual reality.

Jenny is a UX designer  and her team was comprised of three other people: a VR businessman who was more interested in designing and coding, a back-end developer who chose to work on presentations, and a 3D architect who dabbled a bit in everything.

She says that developing a concept was the hardest part, but then they were off and running!

Here are some other good lessons from Jenny:

From the hackathon, I learned about the infinite possibilities designing in a virtual reality world, and about the limitations in creating a virtual reality world. But despite limitations in technology, there is no reason to limit our imagination, especially at a hackathon!

I also learned a lot about collaborating with people I’d just met to create a solid concept, people who are different stakeholders in the project. StartApp did a great job of putting together diverse teams which made for a great working experience.

At the very end, I made a few friends and learned a lot about myself — how I can still function without sleep many years post sleepless college and grad school years, how unnecessary it is for me to eat 3 charred hotdogs and 3 different flavors of ice creams at 1am, how excited and happy I get just listening to and talking about each of our thoughts and checking out each of our iterations on the Merge throughout the night…

…and how I am not afraid to advocate for my design ideas when I know there is data to back me up as evidence.

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