Behind the Hackathon in Erste Group IT

From Friday to Saturday last week, some of us attended hackathon in Erste Group IT. How did it happen? What were the results? 

We started with presentations... 

The company Erste Group IT organized a number of interesting lectures on topics such as: bluetooth, wifi, blockchain, ICO, drones, cloud, smart mettering and robotics. We also had a presentation about augmented reality and mobile apps development. 

... we were mentoring, organizing and testing during that time... 

After the presentations, participants started working in teams and our task was to help them and guide them to solve the specific assignments: 

• Analyzing emotions in conversation

• Weather station 

• Measurement of the employee's working time

• Intelligent beer glass

• Sudoku solver 

• Robot in labyrinth 

• Remote control of air conditionin

Hackathon participants we very skilful and many of their ideas stood for reflection and realization.
 

Some of us were playing virtual reality through VR HTC headset: 

Some of us tried Windows Mixed Reality headset Acer. The Windows Mixed Reality Headset is comfortable and easy to adjust as you experience different apps while walking wherever you want.  

"The headset has good support and simple setup on Windows, but there are no free titles and demos that people can try out how the VR works, as well as some good technical demo. The cameras on the front has a good sense of movement in the space... it was very pleasant surprise for me," said our 3D developer Noro.  

Our developer Martin was playing with the JD Humanoid robot - started his software & programmed his movements.  

Night was a sign of programming, plyaing, watching movies, relaxing and much more. :)

On Saturday morning, our little friend - the robot prepared a warm up (the moves were also programmed by our developer Martin):

... and ended with a presentation of results and evaluation.  

After lunch, we all sat down and started to present the results. The winner was the team of participants who had to suggest a solution for measuring the employee's working time. They created a mobile app with automatic GPS tracking of working hours which also calculates the employee's earnings and sends notifications of the achievements. 

The 2nd place winner was so-called "Intelligent beer glass". The team came up with a light sensor in the glass that measures its plenarty and send notifications to waitress to bring another beer on the table.   

Two teams also received a reward for completed solutions. The first team designed a mobile app for analyzing emotions in conversation - the app records the sound and based on the text analysis with the IBM cloud service, it shows emotions through emoji in mobile. The second team designed a weather station as the basis of a smart home concept that measures humidity, temperature and luminosity in the house.  

We really enjoyed the Hackathon and we are also glad that this event had a possitive feedback from the participants. We would like to thank Erste Group IT for cooperation and believe that this is not our last event together. :)