The problem VRScript solves

Learning programming is hard! It has lead to a diversity problem in computing jobs. Also, the skills required in programming is benefitial even if the persion is working in a different discipline. Also, the majority of STEM jobs now are computing jobs. It would be immensiely benefitial for the world to have more programmers. There are several attempts made for lowering the barrior to entry in programming. Noteble among them are visual/graphical programming languages that allows users to generate eye catching animations and interactions without having to write complex code in textual manner. Languages such as LOGO and Scratch has benefited the world a lot. Unfortunately both of them are obsolete now and their 2D interface is no longer attractive to our 3D games addicted children. We need a new programming language which opens a whole set of new interactions and mediums using 3D.

Hence, we present VRScript - a modern VR based visual programming language guarenteed to catch eyes of kids and youngsters of our modern generation.

Challenges we ran into

As far as we know, this is the first VR based visual programming language. We faced several challenges most of them occured due to lack of maturity in ecosystem of web based VR apps (we were keen on using the web since cross-device compatibility was crucial for us). We encountered few bugs in a-frame and a-frame-gui. We wasted a lot of time not realising the bug was not in our code but in the libraries.

It was also hard coming up with code for an interpretor. We have no knowledge in developing compiler or interpretors. We faced several hurdes creating a logic for execution of our super simple programming language. Implementing logic that works correctly with nested loop took hours. Originally, we had plans to also implement conditions as well, but due to lack of time, we had to make the sacrifice.

This hackathon was an amazing learning experience due to this hurdles. So thanks to them!