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Nvidia offers $30,000 bounty for most innovative VR project

Jon Martindale
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The launch of commercial virtual reality headsets from HTC and Oculus is the biggest VR event of the year, but Nvidia is looking to make its annual GPU Technology Conference (GTC) quite a VR show too. With that in mind, it’s offering a prize pack worth $30,000 to enterprising VR developers who showcase the most innovative use of the technology.

Set to take place between April 4-7 this year, Nvidia’s GTC is typically where we learn much about what the graphics chip maker has planned for the year ahead. In 2015 we learned that it would catch up with AMD’s usage of High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM), but would skip the first generation.

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While this year’s event will no doubt have much to say about the upcoming Pascal range of GPUs, there’s much more of a virtual reality focus.

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Looking to draw in venture capitalists and developers interested in virtual reality creation is Nvidia’s Emerging Companies Summit (ECS) VR Showcase, which will give a number of teams and companies the chance to show attendees some of the interesting virtual reality services and systems they’ve been working on.

Submissions are open now and run until March 7, so there is a little time to get your work in. From there, Nvidia will choose eight finalists, all of whom will be granted free access to the show and a 15-foot-square space to show their work off to all attendees. The teams will then be grilled by Nvidia VP of business development, Jeff Herbst and VP and co-founder of Epic Games, Mark Rein, to see how well thought out the projects are.

Although not all of them will be games, one stipulation of the contest is that everyone builds something that utilizes GPU technology, which makes sense — this is an Nvidia event after all.

After consultation and showing has been completed, a final winning team will be chosen and granted the grand prize of $30,000 worth of cash and prizes, which could go a long way toward aiding a fledgling developer team.

Although not everyone can win, the conference itself should be very interesting, with showcases from the likes of ANTVR. The chance to have knowledgeable attendees discuss and try out your work could be invaluable.

Do you have a VR project that might be worthy of being shown off at GTC?

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