78 lines
3.8 KiB
Markdown
78 lines
3.8 KiB
Markdown
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layout: post.html
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title: "Emerging Tech Weekender & Digital Oxford"
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date: 2014-11-17
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tags: JavaScript DigitalOxford ETWOx Hackathon
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summary: "I spent this past weekend in Oxford Brookes participating in the [Emerging Tech Weekender](http://emergingtechweekender.co.uk) organised by [Digital Oxford](http://www.digitaloxford.com)"
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---
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For those who don't know, Oxford is the place for digital, and [Digital Oxford](http://www.digitaloxford.com) is a community group dedicated to promoting this fact.
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Their latest event offering was hackathon going by the name of [Emerging Tech Weekended](http://emergingtechweekender.co.uk), a weekend long event bringing together designers, developers and business brains to explorer new ideas and technologies revolving around three technology themes: Multi-device web, Internet of things and mesh networks. There was tech and business mentors floating about providing help to teams all weekend.
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The weekend kicked off on Friday with something of a surprise to me...
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{{> tweet id='533329134232289281' }}
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[STFC](http://www.stfc.ac.uk) helped sponsor the event. Who knew? (I know I sure didn't).
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After the tech mentors gave their presentation & demos we began mingling over drinks and coming up with ideas for teams to work on. When we all came back together we had a large number of good ideas suggested.
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{{> tweet id='533355898086129664' }}
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We each had two votes we could give to an idea and then teams were formed out of the top voted. I joined the "Dude, where's my cat?" team. The idea was, we never have any idea where our cats are, wouldn't it be great if we could track them somehow?
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{{> picture alt="Dude, where's my cat?" caption="Dude, where's my cat?" url="/images/DudeWheresMyCat.jpg" }}
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{{> tweet id='533380993265438720' }}
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So... we discovered pretty quickly that the idea has been done, repeatedly. :disappointed:
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So I joined SenseSpace! The ideas was pretty simple, create a gaming platform that could be used on mobile devices to take digital games into the real world using things like geolocation and mesh netowkring. Our proof of concept was a game of tag. Each player has a mobile device, they access our web application and their position is plotted on a map. Other players in the area are then shown as opponents. A single player is "it" and must catch an opponent by getting close enough for long enough.
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Our final project didn't quite make it that far but we did get enough to convey the basic idea to people.
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{{> tweet id='533979636909506560' }}
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As part of our pitch we did a short example video of us playing tag with our devices. I was even able to make use of a pair of Google Glasses to get some pretty cool point-of-view footage.
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I thought Google Glass would be a cool platform to be able to actually play our game on (if you ignore the cost for a moment). Unfortunately...
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{{> tweet id='533995183248252929' }}
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When it came to Sunday evening it was time for the pitching and judging. There was a lot of goo pitches and a lot of impressive work done in just a couple days.
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SenseSpace was getting some very positive feedback.
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{{> tweet id='534020893203521536' }}
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There was a lot of good ideas from Queue controlling...
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{{> picture alt="Q-Control" caption="Q-Control" url="/images/QControl.jpg" }}
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...to audience roulette...
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{{> picture alt="CrowdLighter" caption="CrowdLighter" url="/images/CrowdLighter.jpg" }}
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But my personal favourite, and the one that got my vote during the audience voting, was Team Brush!
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{{> tweet id='534030183129702401' }}
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So... the results are.........
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## Audience Favourite
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**Team Brush!**
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## Best Technology
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**SenseSpace** (Woo!)
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## Best Commercially
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**Team Brush!**
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All in all it was an amazing weekend with a lot of effort put in and fun had by all.
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I would like to thank everyone involved in organising and running the event, truly amazing work.
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