Ten student teams will be selected through a virtual reality program launched in collaboration with social media company, Facebook, and Startup Village Collective under the latter’s School of Innovation.
“India is host to one of the largest community of developers and is also one of the fastest growing regions for startups,” Satyajeet Singh, Head of Platform Partnerships, Facebook India and South Asia, said. “The School of Innovation programme is our investment into skill for tomorrow. We want to make sure, that we have invested in not only helping the communities in building products today, but also in building a world for tomorrow.”

Startup Village Collective, based in Bengaluru, is an incubator platform for students, the first of its kind in the country. The program is set up by the two companies with the hope of encouraging Indian students to develop marketable innovations within the emerging virtual reality sector and providing them with guidance and education from field experts.

“The new programme is a step forward, in realising our vision of building an ecosystem that inspires innovation and empowers young talent to build products using emerging technologies such as VR that will shape the future of businesses,” Singh said. The program will be an available space for almost 4 million students to seek mentorship in the development of ideas and products, and is open to 3,300 colleges.

“(The) startup ecosystem in India is plagued by the notion that they are copycats of the US models. We need to change this perception that our startups only hop into the bandwagon while others blaze the trail,” Chairman of SV.CO, Sanjay Vijayakumar said. The ten winners will go through a six-month program where they will be guided on different aspects of the process from building prototypes to launching to consumers, and will present their product to the leadership team in Facebook’s India office in January 2019. “The VR platform, in throwing open uncharted areas, provides us just that opportunity. And we are a happy partner with Facebook which recognises the potential of bright 18-22 year olds in Indian colleges in working wonders with the new technology,” Vijayakumar said.

(Picture courtesy: Time.com)