Over the weekend, over 500 hackers from approximately 40 different universities all over the world came together to build hacks from scratch.
The hackathon started on Friday and concluded Sunday with a demo session, where the top 20 teams were given the opportunity to present their apps to the audience and a panel of judges at Irvine Auditorium for a chance at the grand prize.
This year, the finalist teams came from a variety of backgrounds, including a team of high school students from New Jersey as well as a team from Zurich, Switzerland.
The app WebTube, created by a Penn student, won third place as well as the audience choice award. The app allows users to surf the web through an old-school television screen.
Virtual Perspective, created by the team from ETH Zurich, came in second. The Android app uses facial recognition techniques to allow users to view photos of an object in a realistic 3D experience.
The grand prize went to the creators of “Inventory,” a hardware hack developed by students from the University of California, Berkeley. The app detects the contents in the backpack and notifies the users if they forget to pack an item.
The team, which demonstrated the hack successfully at the session, won $4,000, a trip to Google in New York City, automatic entry into Greylock Hackfest 2 and an opportunity to showcase their app at the Philly Tech Meetup.
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