Over seven years, Lviv IT Cluster, together with IT companies, updated 19 bachelor’s programs at four universities in the city, including 8 programs at Lviv Polytechnic National University. Now students, together with mentors from IT companies, create their own projects from their first year of study.
The first-year students of the IT Sales Management program at the Institute of Computer Science and Information Technologies, Lviv Polytechnic, have developed the Utahpot project. This is an innovative solution for introducing a new level of 3D graphics based on the graphics API – WebGPU in web browsers. An API is a way for different applications to communicate with each other and exchange information. And WebGPU is a new API standard. It enables developers to create more detailed, realistic and interactive 3D graphics that is currently available only in specialized applications or games.
The tool the Utahpot team is working on allows you to create 3D models of products for their visualization in the marketplace; or to develop fully-fledged games with modern graphics in the browser. For this, students created a special library utahpot.js. Such libraries are needed to help developers use WebGPU or any other complex tool or technology. They provide ready-made functions, classes, and other components that simplify the development process.
«The authors of existing libraries for creating 3D graphics do not hide that to use their solution you must first master 3D software. However, front-end developers don’t want to waste time on acquiring skills from a completely different field», say the first-year students.
Functions in the utahpot.js library will not require additional knowledge. The developers will be able to use settings templates, which will allow creating high-quality 3D graphics without deep diving into the code. The team is currently testing their product and looking for investment. And this autumn, they plan to launch a working version of the library that will be available to all developers. You can view how the graphics can look like on the website on the project resource.
