We’re on the ground in New York City for TechCrunch Disrupt NY. Year after year TechCrunch Disrupt is one of the best events that we’ve covered. Disrupt connects apps, startups, and investors in three days (+2 for the hackathon) that are intense, and full of knowledge.

The first part of Disrupt is the hackathon which started on Saturday and continued for 24 hours until 96 teams all pitched their ideas onstage in one minute quick pitches. There were a wide range of ideas presented including social mobile apps, Google Glass apps, web based platforms, and some ridiculous ones as well. Not surprising we also saw apps for the Oculus Rift, Facebook’s recently acquired virtual reality/AR platform.

Vrban was one of those Oculus Rift apps and with a lot of the focus these days on Oculus it was a clear front runner.

Vrban allows users to explore urban environments using the Oculus Rift. Using the app the user can adjust things like sunlight, point of view and location making it easy to observe the impact of different decisions in an urban environment or urban plan.

The idea for Vrban came about because when the creator/founder “Angel” was a student at Columbia University the school had just built a new science and mathematics building. After the building was complete though, it blocked the school’s observatory  and an important source of sunshine down to the campus. Angel realized that with the Oculus Rift you could lay these variables into the picture while observing it in person with the Oculus Rift.