I got a phone call recently from my friend Pete for some ‘design support’ for a weekend competition at his work – er.. starting tomorrow?
This was Datacom’s ‘Datacomp: Beyond Touch’ challenge weekend – 48 hours of mayhem as eight teams worked to create something special with various motion sensor devices and present to judges to try and take out the top spot.
Three designers were there to help; myself included, and I found I had a great time time helping out three different teams amongst what I found to be a very friendly and welcoming corporate culture.
Various forms of food and liquid stimulation rolled around on the building on a tea trolley as the teams battled it out. Teams I supported all used kinect devices and developed a body measuring and clothing ordering service; an OSH exercise programme (where a skeleton and Papa Smurf became an option as your body double), and a gamified billboard application which drew attention from shoppers.
After a 48 hour straight code fest at Datacomp, all the teams brought together a functioning application. Team Billboarders however reigned supreme and took out the top spot, impressing the judges with a fantastically slick retail application integrated to both CRM & Facebook using Microsoft Kinect.
In a space of 48 hours the team had managed to get through a huge amount of design, development & integration work to produce an end-to-end enterprise ready solution for the retail space which sewed together C#, the Kinect SDK, a simple PHP website, Facebook Graph, and CRM integration (using a simple internet facing web service) to build an application that will allow us to gather information from a user experience in the app and make it available inside an enterprise grade system such as CRM.
Congrats though to all the teams involved. It was a great way to get to a sense for the Datacom crew.
