Watch the video from ARctic Challenge!
From Saturday morning November 19th to Sunday November 20th, Sense Smart Region along with some co-organizers a arranged unique Hackathon in Skellefteå focusing on Augmented Reality. There were just under 60 registered participants, but everyone didn’t make it to get here. We had invited ICT students, refugees with skills to participate, individuals with the same skills and companies. All target groups were represented. Some had signed up as teams, and some formed their teams when they met at the hackathon, (for instance team AD-HOC who came as the second best).
Arctic Challenge was held in the Great Northern, which is almost complete. Besides a temporary entrance everything we needed for our hackathon was finished. The work flowed very well. We started with some practical information from the organizers and continued with a short presentation of Techfugees held by Tom Hayton over the network from England. Later Gustav Sterbrant and Raihan Ul Islam from LTU in Skellefteå informed about the tools that we prepared for the exercises.
Seven teams worked hard and committed throughout the time that was available. It wasn’t easy to get everyone to leave when we closed the premises at 23 Saturday night. Some continued to work on their own even during the night.
Already Saturday afternoon, all the teams made a first presentation of their idea, and got some feedback from the jury, which consisted of:
· Saguna, Luleå University of Technology and SenseSmartRegion
· Ghassan Amayra, Techfugees
· Lena Staflund, Tieto
· Leif Häggmark, Skelleftea Digital Alliance and SenseSmartRegion
There was also some time to finalize their solutions and develop their presentation on Sunday morning before the final presentations began.
It wasn’t easy to take part in the jury. All teams had succeeded surprisingly well in such a short time, both in developing solutions and in creating stunning presentations that in some cases contained animations and film sequences, where they showed how they developed the AR solutions are used in the real world. Finally the jury succeeded in appointing a first and a second prize winner.
First prize winners Skellefteåll consisted of Olga Rybnytska, Felipe Leon, Victor Araujo, Atefeh Maleki, and Chandara Chea. They had developed an AR solution with the same name as a team. It’s an interactive game to discover Skelleftea, which can be advantageously used by children, tourists and immigrants. You take a picture of a building or an object in town. The app recognizes the object and tells you what it is in your own chosen language. You can also earn points by collecting items.
Second prize winners Team AD-HOC consisted of James Zhou, Greger Burman, Christopher Lundberg, Mattias Svedjevik and Simon Larsson. Their app Sortly facilitates waste sorting by reading QR codes on the bins and presenting pictures and text about what to put in the bin in their chosen language, as Augmented Reality. Furthermore, you can also read bar codes on packages and thus know how it will be sorted, or that you have to take it to the recycling station.
As already said, the jury’s work was tough. None of the other five contributions were far behind the winners.
The initiative was jointly conceived by the SenseSmartRegion project and Skelleftea Digital Alliance.
It was also supported/sponsored by Skellefteå Science City, Techfugees, DF Skellefteå and the Smart Tillväxt project.
