MIT to Hold Virtual Reality Hackathon Sponsored by 20th Century Fox

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is holding a hackathon for virtual and augmented reality in Cambridge, Mass. this week that counts 20th Century Fox’s Innovation Lab amongst its sponsors.

The three-day event, dubbed “Reality, Virtually,” will bring together developers to spend three days to build applications for a wide variety of fields, including social networking, education, art, film and journalism as well as health and medicine. Winners will get more than $15,000 in cash and product prizes.

The Fox Innovation Lab isn’t just acting as a sponsor of the event, but will also be on location to mentor participants and take part in the judgement of final entries.

“Education has always been a key element of the mission of the Fox Innovation Lab,” said the Lab’s managing director Danny Kaye. “Providing guidance and tools to the next generation of developers paves the way for more projects like the Martian VR Experience, and pushes the boundaries of what’s possible in this space.”

Fox first previewed the “Martian VR Experience” as a spin-off of its 2015 blockbuster “The Martian” earlier this year. The studio has yet to publish it on a high-end VR platform, but has ambitious plans that go far beyond using VR to simply promote the movie. “We expect ‘The Martian VR Experience’ to be profitable,” Fox Home Entertainment president Mike Dunn told Variety earlier this year.

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