Hats off to hackers—innovative solutions aplenty at Redmond hackathon

  • Article

This past weekend, we were delighted to host a Kinect for Windows v2 hackathon on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington. We saw some very cool, extremely ambitious projects. We were also joined by some special guests: Christian Schaller and Hannes Hofman of Metrilus came from Germany to share their finger tracking library with participants, and Adrian Ferrier, Mitch Altman, and Aaron Bryden came to show the progress they’ve made on their New York Hackathon project, lightspeed.

And the winners are…

  • Team C-Labs took first place (US$500 and two Kinect for Windows v2 sensors) for their app Factory-Relay, an Internet of Things factory automation, safety, and control system.

First-place winners, Team C-Labs

  • Team Ah Kon Cha! earned second place ($250 and a Kinect for Windows v2 sensor) for their game Ah Kon Cha! , a fresh twist on the classic Japanese game show Hole in the Wall.

 Second-place winners, Team Ah Kon Cha!

  • Team BodyMetrics took third place ($100 and a Kinect for Windows v2 sensor) with their project BodyMetrics JointCenterOfMass, which demonstrated how to interpret joint velocities and the center of mass hierarchy for limbs not touching the ground.

Third-place winner, Team BodyMetrics

Honorable mention

Three other projects were recognized by the judges. Each team received a Kinect for Windows v2 sensor.

  • K4Health (team K4Health), which uses Kinect for Windows for smart monitoring and analysis of sleep, posture, and other body states.

 Team K4Health

  • Mini-Mech (team Quaternionundrum) supports robot avateering by applying the joint orientations of a Kinect skeleton to a mechanical system.

 Team Quaternionundrum

  • Tumble Rumble in the Jungle (team The Jungle) is a game in which two players must discover how move their little creature as fast as possible, using their body to push, shove, and fling their way to victory.

Team The Jungle

 

Other projects presented

  • 2048-K (team Metrilus), the puzzle game 2048 with Kinect-enabled interactions
  • Dynamic Perspective (team K-n00bs), which tracks the location of your head to dynamically change the perspective on screen and create an immersive, 3D experienceConnectify (team Connectify), which combines Kinect for Windows and Microsoft Azure to build interactive displays with dynamic content and provides real-time analytics on user engagement for the purpose of customizing the content
  • K-Kontroller (by Chet Lemon), which uses custom Kinect gestures and puts them into any game on your PC
  • K-Polygraph (by Dwight Goins), a Windows Store application that uses Kinect for Windows to evaluate subtle facial expressions, voice pitch, and body movements to determine the truthfulness of responses
  • NUI MoCap (by Jackson Fields), which provides motion capture by using body joints of the Kinect for Windows v2 sensor and rigging them to a character in Unity3D
  • NUIConductor (team NuiStar), which lets users change the tempo and selection of music by using gestures

Upcoming hackathons

Thanks again to everyone who came to the event in Redmond this past weekend! It was great to meet new people and to see innovative ideas put into action.

I hope to see you at another event in the future!

Ben Lower, Developer Community Manager, Kinect for Windows

Key links