One building. 36 hours. Over 1,000 college students. Let the hacks begin!
This past weekend, MHacks III invited college and high school students everywhere to come together in Detroit and build awesome tech products in just the span of three days. What were the prizes? $5,000, in addition to other great awards and prizes from sweet companies such as Yahoo, Bloomberg, Evernote, and NEST. We took a look and discovered 5 epic hacks from the most epic university hackathon this year. Here they are:
Want productivity of a desktop computer on your iPad? That’s what Veeral Patel, Nick Frey, Conrad Kramer and Ari Weinstein made real in their iOS application. According to these savvy app designers, it’s an app that allows users to “drag and drop to create powerful workflows and automate daily tasks.” They deserve that $5,000 grand prize. Check this app in action here.
A team of four consisting of students from DePaul University and University of Michigan swooped up second place with their three-dimensional Quidditch simulator called “Oculus Quidditch“. The player puts on a pair of 3D goggles, straddles a Wii remote with a stick taped to it to resemble a broomstick, and flies through a recreation of popular Harry Potter landmarks. Matt Kula, James Kotzian, Val Litvak, and Douglas Gursha hopes this game will “usher in a new era of realistic gaming and motion control.” Can we say magical?
Penn State undergraduate Donte’ Buckmire created an app called C.T.B.U. Suitcase. He describes it as a “suitcase that charges your devices by the energy that you create by walking and solar panels.” Congrats on snagging third place with it Donte’!
This app created at MHacks is blowing up on Reddit. Currently available on Google play, it’s an app that extracts the DNA of your music. It’ll break down a song and provide all the samples that make it up. Now people have a chance to become a musical scientist here.
Leveraging Google’s voice recognition tools, a team of four students by the names of Saleh Hamadeh, Stephen Schwahn, Iyed Bouchamaoui, and Chris Battaglia created a platform for software developers to easily add voice commands to their apps. SpeakMe creates a friendly smartphone environment for the visually-impaired. You can checkout a demo video on their webpage here.
Did we miss something awesome? Let us know!
