Acer Aspire R7 power helps team Canada create music in real time at World Imagine Cup Finals.

Team ClaVision built some amazing software that uses image processing to take a video of someone playing music to generate sheet music and a midi file in real time. They needed both processing power and versatility to ensure their software would perform as needed during the World Imagine Cup Finals.

If you aren’t familiar with Imagine Cup, it’s Microsoft’s world wide student technology competition. The world finals took place two weeks ago at Microsoft headquarters in Seattle, Washington. Team claVision represented Canada, you can see a sneak peek of Imagine Cup and an interview with our Canadian team at the Imagine Cup website.

Team mentor, Howard Cheng, talks about the Acer Aspire R7 device powered by Intel and why they chose it for their booth. 

“Although our product is computationally intensive and requires real-time computer vision techniques, the Aspire R7 has more than enough power to handle our needs”

As the Canadian winner of the Microsoft Imagine Cup Innovation Competition, our team received an Acer Aspire R7 laptop as one of the prizes generously provided by Intel. Our team made use of this laptop extensively during our various demonstration sessions at the Microsoft Imagine Cup World Finals. Although our product is computationally intensive and requires real-time computer vision techniques, the Aspire R7 has more than enough power to handle our needs. The real-time nature of our product impressed many people, and could not be done without a fast machine.

We also had to demonstrate our software at a number of different locations. Often the physical space given to us was less than ideal. We found that the innovative design of the Aspire R7 allowed us to easily change the way we set up the screen display to adapt to a variety of situations. In fact, we like the laptop so much that we are planning to purchase an additional Aspire R7 for demonstration sessions we have planned in the future.

We would like to thank again for giving us this laptop. It was a fantastic piece of hardware that did exactly what we needed.

We also received Microsoft Surface Pro 2 tablets as prizes. It is our first experience of Windows tablets. They were light and portable, and support many Windows desktop software products that we use. They have powerful hardware and plenty of storage. The keyboards were very good addition and useful for our purpose. At the Microsoft Imagine Cup World Finals in Seattle, we were very pleased with how easy the tablets were to use in different venues.