Sold out within 6 seconds! Hackathon.

The hackathon called IC Hack was organised at the Imperial College London. It all began with an introduction talk that included a special speaker – London’s first Chief Digital Officer, Theo Blackwell.  Other speakers were mainly sponsors, leading companies in software related sector delivering a presentation about trends in high-tech industry and advertising their job opportunities.

Next, we formed teams of up to 5 students and gathered to brainstorm and discuss our ideas for the competition. There were several prices that could be won: for greatest impact on health care, most helpful hack, best mobile app, best hardware hack and many others. The whole event was full of workshops, entertainment and free food.

There were plenty of astonishing hacks. One group, for example, managed to put an extra dimension into playing a popular computer game the Call of Duty. They used a camera vision to track movements of a player and interpreted them as movements of the character in the game. When the gamer walked on a spot, the character was running. Furthermore, they tweaked a mobile phone and attached it to a laser-cut board shaped as a gun. Each movement of this gun was then interpreted as a movement of the gun in the game. Other groups created apps: for translating speech into a sign language of foreign languages, a software that summarises an online video, a movie-recommending web that takes into account complex futures such as emotions and sentiment, and many others. Our group was developing a smart shopping list that lets a user to add items only by taking a picture of an empty package before throwing it away. It automatically recognises the product and downloads its details from the internet. Those are then compared with user’s medical condition or living style targets, which enables the app to recommend alternative products that are more suitable.

At the end of the day, hackathon was about having an amazing time full of networking in an inspirational environment. If you are a tech person and you haven’t been to hackathon yet, don’t wait, go and enjoy! For those who are hardware-oriented, there are hardware hackathons too.