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Congratulations to everyone who participated in Genius DevCamp — the launch of a brand new platform for foundational AI that performs experiments. Dozens of engineers, designers and entrepreneurs gathered at UC Santa Cruz Silicon Valley Extension in Santa Clara, CA from March 14–16, 2025 and showed what causal reinforcement learning can do.

We had an amazing weekend:

• 48 hours of cooperation
• 15 demonstrations
• 12 winning teams

This is how we get the best results and have become the most successful hackathon in the world. Our 18-year tradition is going strong and this year we had the greatest ratio of participants-to-demonstrations ever for an event: 2:1.

It’s who we are and how we work together that matters. The results speak for themselves.

Special Guests

Sheila Lirio Marcelo
Ohai

Founder of Care.com and recent Inc Magazine Female Founder 500 Honoree Sheila Lirio Marcelo flew in with her team (Kevin Yang and Adam Reilly) to present her “second act” in support of busy parents: Ohai.ai. It’s an AI assistant that helps parents (and anyone) manage the cognitive load related to scheduling, coordinating and remembering all of life’s details.

She issued a challenge to the community, and asked for help with a particularly difficult aspect of data management for her AI system. It was inspiring to hear her story and witness the cusp of a new launch.

Chuchu Wang
chuchuwithlove

Executive Coach and brilliant speaker Chuchu Wang also flew in for our event, to help ground us in mindfulness and guide us towards to connection as we built teams and projects over the weekend. She began the event with a visualization, helping us to imagine how success might feel.

Then just prior to the awards ceremony she revisited that moment and kept us focused on gratitude and community, with another wonderful blessing that left us all speechless.

The results were astounding:

The Champions

Best New Developer
SportsTube

The headline for our event was 15-year-old Enzo Roa using reinforcement learning technology to build an instant recommendation system for sports videos.

It was astonishing.

All by himself, using HTML for the first time and some basic instruction from the mentors (including his father), Enzo absolutely crushed it with a working demo and a flawless presentation. With just a few clicks, any user of his system will get better recommendations than you would find on YouTube.

You could use this to transform your own YouTube experience—amazing work for just one weekend!

Future of Truth
Boolean Value

When I asked Dan to attend yet another Developer Camp event, he had an idea immediately: solve social media.

One step in that direction is to reduce the impact of misinformation on certain platforms. Dan chose to create a browser plugin that detects misinformation and presents the user with a Fact Check button instead of a Share button.

This solution prevents people from quickly spreading bad information—and also stops platforms from immediately benefitting from viral shares of inflammatory speech.

Deeply moral.

Ethical Future
Ethical AI

When Yan arrived at the event, she quickly admitted that she’s not a coder—and then immediately got into a deep discussion with the best developers in the room about the ethics of machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Throughout the weekend, she worked to develop a framework to use the new platform to do something that has not been done before: a learning loop that trains and optimizes any LLM to behave in responsible and aligned ways.

Hustle Award
Edenext

When visiting SVVR, we met Remi who had just moved to California after life spent on the islands doing conservation work and construction. In the true spirit of Developer Camp, he taught himself as much as he could learn in 48 hours. He pitched a startup that engages stakeholders in nature conservancy as part of a construction project planning workflow.

At every event there is someone who embodies the principles of entrepreneurship, perhaps in a way that might not be recognized at a traditional hackathon. We are honored to share the spotlight, the way Remi shared his precious ideas.

We are all better together.

Better Health
VitalXR

A huge component of healthy living is making well-informed food choices. When the VitalXR team pivoted from XR into the use of reinforcement learning, they kept the name because the reality is that healthy habits are vital.

When the VitalXR team started applying the new platform to this problem, their system learned from the user’s habits to create a personalized meal program for them — with just a few data points. It was extremely accurate, and a great demonstration of the power of this new platform.

Smarter systems mean smarter societies.

Genius Award
CyberOrganism

There was clearly one team that made the most of the new platform during our event. They built a minimalist interface for a task management system that actually worked.

They used the platform to create a new kind of AI-powered mindmap system. Instead of just being a hierarchical todo list, the AI would organize all of your documents and notes around your project outline — If you were working within a particular part of your project list / outline the AI would bring to bear the most relevant information for that sub-topic and learn to be optimally helpful in realtime, on the fly.

These two epitomize the word genius, as they used the platform to augment their own brains—and made something that they need to see in the world.

Never stop.

Future of Work
Brave Potential

As a former Google, life/relationship coach, and now as an entrepreneur, David knew he was building something to help others. This time addressing the problem that AI will transform the job market and ask large numbers of people to find new uses for their skills. He built a system that surveys users on the types of work they’ve done, adapts to them in realtime, and helps them find skills that they have that can lead to new paths they could pursue.

From the beginning we’ve known that job finding and skills matching was a potentially great use case for the platform. David’s work proved that—and we want to see him succeed.

Ship it!

Rookie of the Year
NotValve AND Pokemon4Ever

Following up on his success with Best Game at our prior event, Elias spent his college Spring Break blowing minds once again.

Going first during our Idea Showcase is never easy. He fought through the initial difficulties with our A/V system with grace, patience and fortitude. He presented his idea as a problem he wanted to solve for himself — a better way to browse and buy STEAM games. The result was an online store for exploring new video games that seems a lot better than anything out there! Maybe this platform will be a nice way for him to pay for college!

But THEN he was tapped to go second—and didn’t skip a beat. Continuing with the theme of Fun and Games, he presented a Pokemon card recommendation system. Each solution perfectly leveraged the strength of the platform and showed us all how quickly a single person can solve their own challenges to make things a lot more fun.

Super fun!

Honorable Mention
OrangeCones

We had to rank the top three ideas overall, but it was a tough choice. Matt used machine learning to decipher and categorize building and inspection codes in California, so that anyone can understand what to do when buying or improving their home.

We all wanted to have this app, and it was impressive and honorable to see him build it all himself.

Make it so, Matt!

Runner Up
Gigos

One of the great challenges when using AI is that blank prompt. In fact there is an entire industry of “prompt engineering” that teaches people how to speak to the system.

ACTAI adventurer Brian Gallagher and his teammate Mitchel Curtis did us all proud by entering the room with an open mind and a generous spirit—and pivoting their idea into a brilliant solution for the common AI user.

This team thought through that challenge from both sides and came up with something truly unique: using the new platform to help a user immediately navigate through a huge selection of possible prompts to provide suggestions within their interests and areas of curiosity.

Keep it up, team!

Best in Show
Pocketflow

This team is that they worked across time zones, having just learned about our event on the day of the competition! Working out of their Stanford dorm rooms, they developed their system called Pocketflow. They demonstrated its ability to convert prompts into UI/UX workflows,by generating an email lead generation workflow on the spot based on call-outs from members of our audience. A compelling vision.

The Ohai team had laid down a challenge — use AI to convert screenshots of emails into properly formatted calendar events. PocketFlow used ChatGPT to break this challenge into a step by step process workflow data structure, and then automatically called DALL-E within that flow to convert an email screenshot into a calendar event.

We were impressed by their youthful energy, entrepreneurship, and demo skills. If more teams are putting together solutions out of their dorm rooms and labs, we want to give them a hand.

Bravo!

Grand Prize

Most Helpful
Jamie Lovett

Behind every group at this event was one person making it all come together. From the documentation to the applications to the API itself, Product Genius teammate Jamie Lovett is a man of all trades.

He was at every table, multiple times. He was on the mic. He was behind the scenes before, during and afterwards. Listening. Learning. Helping. Improving everyone’s work.

Each year we honor the values of open source in our community by giving the Grand Prize to the person who helps the most people during the event. This time it was Jamie, by a landslide.

He was awarded a handcrafted statue of a fisherman from El Nido, Palawan in the Philippines. It is representative of the adage, “Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime.”

Thank you, my friend. This would not have happened without you!

Judges

This time we took a different approach to judging the ideas and pitches that participants created. Normally, we include representatives from our sponsors to help—but this time we included members of our investor community.

Developer Camp formed in 2007, the week that iPhone launched to the public. It was the result of a six person founding team, and rooted in many traditions such as BarCamp, MacHack and SuperHappyDevHouse.

For me the impetus came from a hackathon at Odeo the year prior to that—when Twitter was created. Watching and cheering us on was Bill Tai, an investor in Odeo at the time. He was a backer of Twitter from the start, and a patient believer in my hackathon endeavors ever since.

Skip ahead 18 years to Genius DevCamp and Bill (who has made some brilliant bets since then—like Wish, Zoom, Canva and Color) volunteered to be our VC judge. This way he was able to give direct feedback to the participants and take part in the tradition himself.

Thank you, Bill!

Joining him was his cofounder at ACTAI Ventures, Amanda Terry, and prominent member of the ACTAI Global community Brian Baumann of the NYSE.

Each event has a theme, and this year’s theme is Foundational AI. I had the honor of presenting on this theme at the recent ACTAI Asia Pacific AI Tech Competition in the Philippines, and invited that community to join us for Genius DevCamp. Many of them joined, and so it’s no surprise that our event had a similar vibe:

Shoutout to Eric Nghiem of The Cash Flow Doctor, who flew in to support the group in person and offer his expertise to young startups. In typical fashion he brought his “A” game and had fun in the process, sending this:

Special thanks to my friend Ben Vigoda for creating the technology that allowed our contestants to be successful this past weekend. We’ve been collaborators for decades, in music and in life, but it was unique to see how powerful his Product Genius team could be when driven to help the community.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the Genius DevCamp sponsors including Google, NYSE, Polygon, Archipelo, Product Genius, SVVR, Bitcoin + AI Startup Lab, and UCSC Silicon Valley Extension. Your support and dedication to developers, designers and entrepreneurs around the world has made greatness possible.

Genius DevCamp Winners was originally published in Developer Camp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Register Now for Genius DevCamp

March 14–16, 2025
Online via Zoom and In-person
UCSC Silicon Valley Extension
3175 Bowers Avenue
Santa Clara, CA

Register Now
Cost: $25+

Build AI for Good — Better, Stronger, Faster

Combine Apple Intelligence or Google Gemini with next-generation reinforcement learning to create smarter and more efficient applications — on any platform.

In two months, dozens of engineers, designers and entrepreneurs will gather to explore the frontiers of machine learning. During our 48-hour idea competition, attendees will learn about the latest advancements in machine learning from the world’s foremost experts in the field.

Genius DevCamp follows the tradition of past events, highlighting inclusion, diversity and empowerment in the developer community. Attendees are encouraged to develop native and web applications during this exciting, cooperative, hackathon-style event.

We are thrilled to announce that Google, NYSE and UC Santa Cruz will sponsor us in-person and online, to connect developers around the world.

Now is the time to register if you plan to attend. Space online is not capped this year but only those who have registered in advance will be able to attend.

About the Event

Unique to our event is early access to the “Genius AI/UX” system, provided by our sponsor Product Genius. Their platform is billed as “foundational AI that pursues goals.” It is unique — and ahead of current market offerings.

The Genius Platform is the only AI that performs experiments, abstracts principles from large scale experimental data and pursues goals.

This is useful for things like:

• Product marketplaces
• Person to person matchmaking
• Commercial real-estate property recommendations
• Hotel room and tourist activity booking
• Video, news or other content recommendations
• Music recommendations for listening or practice
• Artwork or craft recommendations
• Social media post feeds
• Job candidate suggestions or jobs listings
• Stock recommendations
• Startup company ideas
• Work task suggestions or summaries
• Robotics and biotech experiments

Event schedule will include educational sessions on topics such as:

• AI / ML
• Software Engineering
• Product Design
• Security Engineering
• Open Source Toolchains
• Design Thinking
• Apple Intelligence
• Google Gemini

Our event is open to developers and entrepreneurs with a range of experience and skills. We hope you will join us for this revolutionary experience.

About the Organizer

Dom Sagolla

Dom is cofounder of the cybersecurity firm Archipelo & cofounder of Developer Camp. He has produced dozens of events, advising many hackathon winners in their journey of success.

About the Judges

Bill Tai

Bill has been funding startups as a VC since 1991 and has had 23 of his startups become listed companies. Personal Angel backer of 3 of the top 10 on “CNBC’s 50 Top Disruptor List for 2022” (#3 Lineage Logistics, #4 Canva, #9 Dapper Labs). Companies he’s been involved with at their starts surpassed $1 Trillion in aggregate market value in 2021.

Brian J. Baumann

Brian is Director of Capital Markets for the New York Stock Exchange. He leads technology initiatives for their global capital markets business, with expertise in futures, low latency, and big data. His goal is to advance the technology strategy and vision of the NYSE, and to contribute to its growth and leadership in the capital markets space.

Ben Vigoda

Ben is CEO and Chief Scientist at Product Genius. He co-founded Lyric Semiconductor, which created the world’s first tensor processor units (TPUs) and the first commercial processor architectures for AI/ML. He works on next generation AI architectures with collaborators at his alma mater MIT, and contributes to DARPA’s AI strategy.

About the Venue

UCSC Extension

The University of California Santa Cruz hosted VisionDevCamp last year, for our most successful idea-per-attendee hackathon yet.

Currently in its 18th year, Developer Camp is an open source community that operates on the principles of inclusion, diversity, and empowerment. Genius DevCamp is a new experience, with a special format to shortcut the path to success.

Sponsors

Google is proud to help you start, build, and grow. Whether you’re beginning, or scaling to meet demand, connect with the right people, products, and best practices to help your startup thrive.

The New York Stock Exchange is where icons and disruptors come to build on their success and shape the future. It’s world’s largest and most trusted equities exchange, the leading ETF exchange and the world’s most deterministic trading technology.

The mission of Product Genius is to change the game for stores — to help stores use AI to compete. Founded on over $48M of DARPA and privately funded research, they develop state-of-the art AI accuracy and controllability.

Archipelo empowers organizations with intelligent SDLC insights to increase developer security, compliance and performance.

SVVR (Silicon Valley Virtual Reality) is an international organization for VR industry professionals dedicated to accelerating the growth of a healthy, diverse VR ecosystem through events, education, and services.

UCSC Silicon Valley Professional Education, the leading workforce educator in Silicon Valley, is the only accredited institution in the area to offer University of California-quality courses designed by experienced instructors who are actually working in their field.

Foundational AI that Pursues Goals was originally published in Developer Camp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Congratulations to everyone who participated in the first ever VisionDevCamp — the world’s largest gathering of Apple Vision Pro developers and devices in history! Over 120 people (more than 56 Apple Vision Pro devices — pictured above) came together in Santa Clara, CA from March 29–31, 2024.

By the way, there were another 20 or so devices that didn’t make it into the photo — check out the gallery. We had an amazing weekend:

• 48 hours of cooperation
• 36 demonstrations
• 27 winning teams (and a notable runner-up)
• 24 mentors

The people pictured above were recognized by the participants awarding them blue tickets after they offered assistance — many of them multiple times. Our most sacred value is helping others. This is how we get the best results and have become the most successful hackathon in the world. Our 17 year tradition is going strong and this year we had the greatest ratio of participants-to-demonstrations ever for an event: 7:2.

It’s who we are and how we work together that matters. The results speak for themselves.

The Champions

Hardest Fail
Unreal Engine on AVP

Andreas Jaensch flew himself in from Germany. He arrived early to the event. He hacked all weekend to try and get Unreal Engine to work on Apple Vision Pro — but it wouldn’t compile. Instead, he got onstage and talked about what he learned. He embraced the situation and showed us a video of someone else who had just gotten it working hours earlier and posted online.

Now THAT is humility. That is grace. And we all learned something in the process.

It happens every event that someone tries and tries and tries but just can’t make it work. Andreas threw himself into a super difficult, bleeding edge technology — and for that we honor him.

Best Developer Tool / Open Source
ARKitVision

There were many great projects that went Open Source over the weekend — but John Haney produced the most useful piece of all, including two template projects:

Common Space is a template project which will go into an immersive space looking for an image anchor.

• The scene will have a homeEntity added, and if the image anchor is found, the homeEntity will be anchored to it’s location
• Then you can add content relative to the homeEntity or just use it for converting transforms relative to the homeEntity
• This will create a common coordinate system you could use to share between devices visiting the same location

SimpleARKitVision provides a code wrapper around setting up an immersive space to be able to take advantage of the various detectors and providers available in ARKit in visionOS. It includes:

• Hand Tracking
• Plane Detection
• Scene Reconstruction
• World tracking
• Image tracking

View the repository on GitHub. Thanks, John!

Best Hardware
RearViewsion Camera

David J. Kordsmeier built a working rear-view camera for Apple Vision Pro — that streams live to your space. It’s a sensor fusion app, based on an ESP32-EYE, and grabs image frames into a floating window. This allows the user in VR to see if someone is walking up on them from behind. The device has face detection (and cat detection) as well so it is possible to add additional features like haptic alerts or notifications if certain things are detected.

It’s always impressive when someone creates working hardware at a software development event. Follow David’s Open Source project on GitHub.

Simplest App
Hand Puppet

Martin Bjerregaard Nielsen flew himself in from Denmark to learn and build something inspired by one of our champions — a virtual hand puppet. Sometimes the simplest ideas can win — because they are achievable in time.

One of the best bits of opening day advice from our Camp Counselor Eric Oesterle was, “Take your idea, then cut the scope in half. Then cut it in half again.” Martin pulled this off entirely by himself — then delighted the audience and judges with his presentation.

Yellow Ducky Award
Duck Chat

John Brewer started off the event with a challenge: take his 3D model of a rubber duck and allow two different Apple Vision Pro devices to see it and be able to point to a specific place on the duck at the same time. From that point on, a meme was born. Several teams incorporated the yellow ducky into their projects and he inspired us all to make collaborative experiences in a shared space.

For his own demonstration, he built chat service between two devices so that they could “quack” to each other. Thanks for making the event more fun and playful, John 🙂

Best Windowed App (2D Window)
Anagram Reality

Ian Baird and his twin daughters Ada and Grace teamed up to create a working game about solving anagrams getting hints — where you get cake as a reward. Not only was it a fun demo, but throughout the weekend we got to witness the spirit of the camp via this team.

Often we talk about how important it is to be inclusive and welcoming of everyone in the community. We make sure to schedule our event over the weekend, bring plenty of food and full meals, and personally advise teams so that they feel empowered to simply try. Anagram Reality is why we do it this way.

Grace was onstage with me when she had just turned four (4) years old at iOSDevCamp 2014:

It’s touching to see families hacking together — and wonderful to see them winning again and again.

Coolest App
Deep Muse

Warren Stringer is another original iPhoneDevCamp alum and prior champion. Not only did he get his app working in visionOS, he built his visualizer so that he could program the experience from another device — iPhone or iPad. From his description:

“Conduct visual music performances with your hands in a full immersive space. Play with your family and friends in real time, where their iPad and iPhone becomes window on that shared stage. Co-pilot a newbie’s experience in the VisionPro on your iPhone. Or: play along with an Apple Pencil or MIDI musical instrument. The possible ways to perform together are only limited by your imagination.”

Warren made the audience gasp and clap and made us all want to try it.

Best Volumes App (Bounded Volume)
Tumble Match

Tim Judkins built a game by himself over the weekend — another act of incredible accomplishment on site. It’s a matching game using a RealityKit volume and physics-based object manipulation. The risky part was demonstrating this live on stage — and it worked. Tim heard about us from the Voices of VR podcast, took a chance and simply crushed it. Can’t wait to see this one in the store.

Best New Developer
Spark

At every event, we have people who are new to the platform, new to the language, or new to the community. It takes tremendous guts and fortitude to progress under pressure, not to mention teamwork and a growth mindset. This was Jeffrey Brown‘s and Jennifer Jiang‘s first time using Swift or Xcode — and they made a beautiful flame appear in visionOS using a snap of their fingers. Impressive! Not only that, but they had a bonus “one more thing” to show us which was a “happy beam” of flame shooting out of the finger.

Magic is real, folks I’m telling you.

Best Storytelling
Huldufolk

“Did you know there are huldufólk, or hidden beings, right here in Silicon Valley? You only need to open your third eye to see them. Go outside and put on your Vision Pro, and if you’re worthy, you will find these huldufólk hidden in nature. And perhaps together, we can foster a better relationship between humans and nature.”

Dane Christensen and Barna Szász teamed up to captivate the audience with their working demonstration of this unique concept. Not only did they build their app around a fun and engaging narrative, they also provided us with a lesson on conserving nature and protecting our environment. Check out their amazing video recap of the event.

Best Unity App
CyberSpace Sam

Sam Mateosian and Victor Arroyo joined forces to bring CyberSpace Sam to visionOS. It featured a “walking, smart-talking avatar” powered by speech recognition and machine learning. This live demonstration allowed the team to take questions from the audience for Sam, all the while showing us the network and API calls running in real time. Super impressive, fully featured, funny and wild!

Best WebXR App
Chem Reality

UC Santa Cruz PhD student Samir Ghosh met Kenneth Ng on site, teaming up to produce an experience that works across every platform. This app provides an educational experience that allows us to view the 3D structure of molecules, with descriptions powered by machine learning.

One of the founding principles of our community is the empowerment of Web technologies. This team once again proves that the constraint of the browser breeds creativity — and brilliance.

Most Motivational
Speak to Your Heroes

Yash Narayan and his Stanford classmate Darrow Hartman are no strangers to the hackathon circuit. In fact, they are organizers themselves. So it was no surprise that they pulled together an impressive, working demonstration of 3D modeling, avatar animation, text-to-speech combined with machine learning to bring comedian Robin Williams back to life for a brief moment in time.

It’s always cool to see presenters who engage with the audience as part of their demonstration. In this case, we all had the chance to play with their prompt and ask questions of the team.

Productivity Award
Time Cake

Erin Pangilinan, Andre Cunha and Steven Pease teamed up, designed and debated features and delivered a working app that helps keep the user on time and on task. Using the “cake” visual metaphor, this app shows time spent on various tasks and personal goals.

They explained their thought process while showing us the results. This stuff isn’t easy! It takes a combination of skills and discipline to make a spatial computing app in one weekend — and this team made the most of their time.

Best Design
Little Spatial Garden

“This app allows us to assemble a little virtual garden through Apple Vision Pro. Little Spatial Garden explores concepts of sandboxing and flower arrangements. Learn about flowers, create arrangements, and share to purchase these arrangements from local florists.”

The team of Paolo Villanueva, Yelena Kozlova and Kate Chen built an absolutely beautiful experience, a compelling and artistic demo and a lovely design that felt like crisp air during our contest. This is another app that is destined for many downloads.

Most Persistent
Navigation Exploration

Romy Ilano, Raymond Chen and Jayson McCauliff iterated over many ideas to consider the best experience when transitioning from one area to the next in spatial computing. At first it would seem obvious: just open a portal and step through it. But that could create disorientation or even nausea, given the rich visual stimulus of Apple Vision Pro.

Instead the team explored shimmering, luminous transitions, walls that come and go, and entire environments that shift and move. In this way, space becomes art and movement becomes shapeshifting and meaningful. We gave this award because the team took time to explain their thought process and efforts to reduce dysphoria. This work could be applicable to everything from museums to games to shared experiences.

Best Shared Experience
Wizard Fight

John Haney, Paige Sun, Gary Yao and veteran champ Kenji Kato built “an anchoring system that makes uniform the coordinate system between multiple AVP’s immersive spaces. As such, entities and views can be encoded and past between devices such that they appear uniformly at the same location for all. This enables multiplayer / multiuser games that share a physical space.”

Using this system, they built a wizard fighting game that completely works. Not only that, but it does not require a server to function. Yes, this is a fully-functional, multiplayer game built upon a server-less, wireless transfer protocol that networks many Apple Vision Pro devices at once — that was built in a weekend from scratch.

I cannot emphasize enough how much talent, skill and problem-solving this represents. Additionally, they Open Sourced the networking code and the Demo code on GitHub. Magic is real, I’m telling you — see their video for yourself!

Most Revolutionary
Vision ProTein

Ed Arenberg and Lance LeMond spent the weekend hacking on a hard science problem: visualizing the molecular structure of proteins. They created a protein molecule alpha folding visualizer in Apple Vision Pro using custom gestures, combining AR, machine learning and biomedical data.

This is something with the potential to save lives. Check out their demonstration here.

Most Creative
MixEffect Vision

Longtime community member and hackathon champ Adam Tow has done it again — this time in 3D space. He created a virtual Blackmagic Design video switcher, “offering fluid switching between video sources, effortless manual transitions via finger movements, and dynamic, animated SuperSource layouts — all in a responsive, real-time, and interactive format.”

Adam’s working code paves the way for realtime video manipulation in spatial computing. It’s a perfect match for the rich visual environment of Apple Vision Pro. Enjoy his masterfully presented demonstration video.

Best Game
Table Soccer

Ok, this is just really awesome: Arthur Baney and Scott Harris built a multiplayer tabletop soccer game that uses Switch controllers to move tiny athletes around a shared soccer pitch. Built using Unity Polyspatial, this game is another shared experience that just blew our minds, and delighted the audience.

What’s really cool about this team is that they built it, made it fun and then had enough time left over to involve other people in the demonstration. Honestly, I want this game in my life. It just looks cute and happy and joyful. Ship it!

Best Student App
3Dress

9th grader Anusha Narayan and her father Amit teamed up to build a “virtual try on room where the user can switch between different outfits to try it out on an avatar that resembles them.” Their demo displayed her avatar walking with three different shirt colors, and then switched between them. The goal as she stated is to reduce the carbon footprint of the clothing industry by eliminating many of the shipping costs and emissions related to returns based on wrong size, fit or color.

Anusha demonstrated the working app, fielded questions and talked about the components and what she learned in the process. It was an impressive display for a first year high school student, and a collaboration that once again demonstrates the principles of our community.

Best Native App
AppleTina

After all the ideas were shared on opening night, I got inspired by all of the people trying something new. So I pulled out my concertina and talked about the challenges learning notes and hand gestures. John Forester, Alexis Fabrigoule, Justin Hebert, David Kordsmeier wanted to build a musical app and so — I can hardly believe it — they constructed a working concertina inside visionOS over the weekend. They sampled my playing and showed how simple finger controls can trigger sounds with an app that actually works.

For Easter they even produced an easter egg: when you hold your hands out wide, it triggers a performance that I recorded for them. I’m truly astonished and grateful that they plan to keep going with it. Kudos!

Most Useful App
Note SP

Sam Nye, Matt Fisher and Takuzen Toh explored an interesting concept at our event: what if you could leave notes anywhere in 3D space that were only visible inside Apple Vision Pro? What really struck the judges was the ambition but also the clarity of their vision.

This project evoked some inspiring questions from the audience. How will notes persist? How will they be shared? Who can edit a note? Sometimes it’s not the answers but the questions that are important. Enjoy their highly polished demonstration video.

Runner Up — Best Unity App
XR Hands

As our sponsor Unity provided multiple yearlong Pro licenses, we were happy to award a Runner Up in this category to Jared Bienz, Saman Sadeghyan and Nicole Lazzaro for their educational collaboration. Enjoy their impressive demonstration video.

“We integrated XRI and XR Hands packages into Unity for Vision Pro, aiming to optimize development workflow for cross-platform immersive experiences on the Vision Pro headset. XRI provides fully articulated hand tracking, allowing us to create immersive environments on Windows PCs. These environments can be easily converted and tested on a Mac device before final deployment on the Vision Pro headset.”

Most Magical
Magic Hands

Sometimes there is an idea that just won’t leave you alone. Like this notion that magic… is real.

As an organizer of the event, I hesitated to share my idea because, well, everyone had such great ambitions! I didn’t want to take away from that. But… I just had to see if something was possible. And I didn’t want to just ask people to do it for free.

So, I offered the attendees some cold, hard cash for working code that did one thing: snap your fingers and create fire. The Spark team did something like this — and they won Best New Developer for it. The Wizard Fight team made a fantastic fireball battle — and won Best Shared Experience.

But Greg Schwartz and Mikaela Caron… just kinda… brought my imagination to life pretty much exactly as I had envisioned it. Simple and accurate hand-tracking, instant reaction time and a beautiful orange flame.

It wasn’t easy, and there were multiple points of discouraging failure. I think I was drawn to the story of their work as much as I was the result, as they showed their journey on stage. These are two individuals that would have never met otherwise, drawn together by the challenge, discarding their own ambitions to chase after an idea they’d just heard. And they did it. Simply magical.

Best Solo Developer
PinchBar

Zac White is a man with so much talent and vision he is actually ahead of his time. In truth he developed a project called ARKit at a prior event — before Apple even announced their framework.

So when Zac spent the weekend hacking, he didn’t just make something awesome. He also helped others by standing up a deployment network for others to use when pushing apps to their devices. But of course what he made is both beautiful and nostalgic: a complete replica of the MacBook TouchBar inside visionOS.

PinchBar does everything: controls, sliders, buttons, switches — and it reacts to gestures and direct manipulation. It completely works. Of course he made it Open Source. The man is a mensch. A one-man force. And we are grateful.

Best in Show
Camera Obscura

Of all the demonstrations at this event, there was one in particular that stood out as a mind-blowing technical and artistic achievement. Ina Yosun Chang recorded her magnificent contribution for us to show — because get this: she did it while fighting a Covid infection.

Thankfully she caught it in time to spare the rest of us, but she didn’t get to hear the awed reaction of our crowd during demo time. Her app lets you turn a photo into its own world by AI converting detected objects into 3D models.

“Upload your image and the server runs object detection and segments and processes the image for AI3D conversion. It will also generate several different artistic stylizations.

Then activate the AI3D light beam by heading over to the Oculus side of our AI3D Camera Obscura. Peer into the AI3D Oculus to check out the generated artistic stylizations of your image. She demonstrated a van Gogh style — totally cool.

Next, you can tap the AI3D Oculus button to fully enter the AI3D Camera Obscura — and tap the image to show the detected object completely segmented from the foreground. The built-in AI has attempts to fill in the removed object.

You can then press the AI3D Oculus button to go back to the external mode. You can repeat the process to create a cadre of detected objects. Tap each one to have it pop into the estimated z position, and to start the image-to-3D preview generation process. Pinch to move any of them.”

You could audibly hear jaws hitting the floor at demo time. Get well soon, Yosun because you must ship this!

Most Helpful
20 Tickets

The Grand Prize at our event goes to former champion and volunteer Dan Zeitman. At the end of our award ceremony, we ask everyone who helped another person with their project to please rise. We then start counting the tickets to see who helped the most times.

Dan was far and above the greatest recipient of praise as a mentor. This is our top honor, because helping others is what makes our community so special and creates a caring, authentically open vibe that cannot be faked. Dan has won this prize in the past, and he’s even helped to organize past events. He helped us with sponsors and brought attendees, he even picked up the tee-shirts this time. He’s a true hero and inspiration to us all.

Thanks, Dan! And thank you to all of our wonderful sponsors and community partners. This event was an intimate gathering of thoughtful, skillful and visionary entrepreneurs from all walks of life. We can’t wait to do it again soon!

Sponsors

VisionDevCamp Sponsors include ARound, Archipelo, ShapesXR, UCSC Silicon Valley Extension, Unity, Waterfield Designs, and Zum.

Discord

Join our Discord server to get the latest information about the event, meet team members, and chat with the organizers.

Apple Developer Program

Attendees are highly encouraged to become members of the Apple Developer Program to have access to the resources and tools necessary to develop application for Apple Vision Pro and visionOS.

Apple, Apple Vision Pro, and visionOS are trademarks of Apple Inc. Unity and Unity PolySpatial are trademarks of Unity Technologies. Other company and product names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

VisionDevCamp is not affiliated with Apple Inc.

VisionDevCamp Winners was originally published in Developer Camp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

For three days, over one hundred and fifty strangers worked together to form twenty-two great teams and demonstrate shared ideas in working form. Gathering at Draper University’s Hero City, this was Developer Camp’s 20th event, and it brought together our most diverse group of participants ever.

Our goal is to bring gender equality to all technology communities, and we achieved 31% female participation, which is unprecedented in the blockchain developer space.

We chose Hero City because that co-working space is the genesis of our host Zūm, and a place where startups are born and incubated. This proved true once again.

Alumna and successful cofounder Janice Fraser of Adaptive Path and Luxr, the former Chief Product Officer of Bionic gave us all some perspective on what it means to be successful in the fast-moving world of startups and entrepreneurship. We all must judge success for ourselves, and pull strength from the moments and people that challenge us.

After pitches from each member of the audience, teams formed organically. Days of hard work resulted in three-minute demonstrations which showed us that Janice is right.

The best ideas, backed by teams that can execute, are born in the toughest of circumstances — as long as we have the support of a diverse community.

Awards

Most Revolutionary

Game Stor

Barry was the one of the first to arrive at the event. He ended up going first during demonstrations, and wound up first to receive his award. You gotta hand it to a person who breaks ground like that.

He fully demonstrated a video game distribution and hosting platform, built using TODA, and the Mimik Edge SDK. He showed us a working game using blockchain via Mimik services running on his phone. He used Python, Sphere, TODAQ, and, get this — he developed it entirely on site.

Revolutionary, indeed.

Most Motivational

Little Buddy

This two person team, who demonstrated their work by passing the mic back and forth, gave a clear description of the problem: we each require slightly different motivations in order to achieve our goals. Some are competitive, some are supportive, and some are collaborative when it comes to progress.

They showed a wonderfully designed virtual companion that promotes motivation and personal growth, using three different personae. They plan to pursue it at their upcoming One Medical hackathon, and so we just had to cheer them on.

Best Open Source

Rank Choice

Of all awards at Developer Camp, none is more sacred than Best Open Source. Open Authentication (Oauth) and PhoneGap came from this category, among many other projects like iUI, and TouchCode. We are a community built on top of open standards and open source code. It is our responsibility to give back as individuals.

This year, two of our most distinguished alumni joined up with two new attendees to deliver a clever, simple implementation of rank choice voting. Built using TODA blockchain, ethereum, and Swift, the team created a service and opened it up using the MIT license. They even demonstrated it live using the audience as subjects.

Kudos to this impressive team and their ambitious goal to allow rank choice voting in any context. Kryptonic is proud to stand alongside these creators and offer them the chance to imagine how far their talents will reach.

Best Game

Loot Quester

Nothing appeals to the audience quite like parent-child-based teams. Pair that with one of our founding competitors, a wizard out of NASA who won our contest years ago and sold the result to one of our sponsors, and you have a formula for success.

Loot Quester promises to “end boredom by allowing you to play games as you change classes” at school. Using a TODA / Swift API that they built, and a set of unit tests that they open sourced, this game provides bragging rights, along with traceable transfer of ownership for digital assets. This is a blockchain-based location adventure game, and it had the crowd yelling.

Freely available using the MIT license, check l00tqstr.com for future details. The team received an offer of incubation by TODA, and were invited to pitch their business to Kryptonic.

Best New Developer

Fred’s Coffeshop

Delivered via live demo in the iOS Simulator, this app features group chat, cross-platform features using Flutter, and utilize Kintone as their database. In a limited amount of time, they even managed to learn Dart.

Fred’s Coffeeshop is more than an app, however — it’s an experience. The concept is to give customers a place to work in peace, share moments, share cannabis, and meet friends. This group is self-taught and highly motivated, with a vision. We can’t wait to see what is next from them.

Best Student Developer

Unicorn Catch

Daughter of our host company’s CEO, sister of our winningest young alumnus, you would expect great things from this fourth-grader. Knowing this, you could not have been more proud watching her demonstrate her work in front of the crowd.

Built using Scratch, this is “a game that you can play if you are bored.” Animated with custom artwork and written using Scratch, Anusha’s game is live and playable right now. Her poise and preparation beguiled the audience and showed her to be a true “unicorn” herself.

Coolest

Geeky Jacket

What do you do when you’ve been helping out every other team on site, have only a few hours before demo time, but you have a super fun idea? You get yourself to the fabric store, whip out a circuit board, and hit the stage Project Runway style.

Beginning their demo with party music, the Geeky Jacket team proceeded to “connect to my jacket, as one does.” Using Google colors and bling, with custom stitching, this team added Flutter to clothing. Distributed using the MIT License, this project has been blowing up Twitter ever since its debut.

This was definitely and immediately the coolest demo we saw, but you don’t have to take our word for it.

Eric Oesterle on Twitter

Proud to win #devcamp's "coolest hack"! @neil_c_heather & I demo #geekyjacket our @flutterio-controlled, blingy wearable. Flutter controls an @adafruit Feather M0 MCU via Bluetooth LE. NeoPixel LEDs gently diffused w black chiffon (@JoAnn_Stores!) Thx @dom & @iPhoneDevCamp. 🙏 https://t.co/7RNTWMjwcB

Hustler Award

PCSA

PCSA stands for private car sharing application, and it was built using Kintone on windows in the early hours before our showcase. Shown in a live demo, its fearless creator took on one of our most successful alumni companies without realizing it.

Instead of being critical, the crowd encouraged her to find a niche where Getaround cannot win. Her unflappable response earned her our new Hustler Award for the participant with the most ambition and personal drive to learn.

Best Sacrifice to the Demo Gods

Clipboard Share

Occassionally, a programmer attempts a feat so insurmountable that it actually fails on stage. When this happens, that person can either crumble or stand tall and discuss what they learned. Peer Dampmann, an experienced Developer Camp winner, chose the latter and showed not only courage but also grace.

He was attempting to use Flutter and Firebase to share a clipboard between platforms. He wasn’t able to get this to work over the weekend, but did reveal some flaws in both systems that turned the imagination of the audience to support his idea.

It happens every time: someone has to make everyone else look good. We celebrate ambition and persistence, and so we awarded Peer with the encouragement to keep trying.

Best Design

Untangled

A multiple award-winning pair, a user experience graduate student, a healthcare expert from out of state, and a resident entrepreneur met on day one and stuck like glue. From that moment, they dedicated themselves to the problem of staying focused. The result is a project that helps creative people stay on task, demonstrated across platforms and the Web.

Driven by user research and built using Flutter, Firebase, and React, this team showed the audience how great design starts at the kernel and flows outward. A cross-platform, live demo, this project looks ready to ship an alpha. It showed how to fully sync across the Web as well.

Billed as “a simple to use tool to help creatives add, share and easily update todo lists that uses technology to improve their workflow,” you should CheckUntangled.com and see for yourself why they won yet again.

Best Developer Tool

imgMARK

Led by a grand-prize-winning Camp Counselor, this team showed a working web demo, served using localhost, and built from scratch over the weekend. Using Flutter and AWS, and hoping to become an open standard, imgMARK is an image rights protection service that enables high quality unmarked images to be displayed on authenticated sites. The system automatically watermarks any unauthorized downloads.

You know you are onto something when people come up to you afterwards with suggestions on how to improve it. This team got all of the developers in the room talking.

Concept Award

Ground Truth

While helping the Deep Waste team (see below), Bilahari somehow found time to demonstrate the integration of TODA and TODAQ to crowd source queries for ground truth and incentivize the sharing of information.

In the best tradition of Developer Camp, their work may be found at: https://github.com/bakkiraju/groundTruthTODA. Although still in early concept phase, we loved the vision and always support a team that helps other people.

Cross-Platform Award

Inventory

Our sponsor, Kintone, put out a challenge to any team that fully utilizes their platform, pushing it to levels not yet reached. The Inventory team showed a working demonstration of a POS system using Flutter across platforms.

Inventory is available now at https://github.com/hemonserrat/Inventory under the GNU license. The team was awarded a cool two grand for their professional pursuits.

Most Educational

Binaroo to the Rescue

Once in a while, a person’s pitch comes to life so fully over the weekend that you actually learn something just by watching their progress. This team, led by a certified expert in special education, showed us all exactly how to take a physical tool and scale it up using software tools and technology.

Binaroo to the Rescue is a kids computer programming tool, driven by a fun story that had us all engaged. Using Flutter, Kintone, a custom (patented) bitboard reproduced for iPhone—and a poster board—this team left no doubt that anyone can learn binary.

Most Inspirational

InspireLab

InspireLab helps middle schoolers and high schoolers make an impact through experiential learning. Building with Raspberry Pi, one of our favorite platforms, this team had a strong user flow and selflessly donated all of their work to the public domain: https://github.com/AbelRR/InspireLab.

Never stop.

Most Organized

Navi

This pair of sisters showed up at Developer Camp on a mission. The Murillo girls immediately dedicated themselves to finding a team that could take advantage of their coding skills. They found four interaction designers and together built a feature that should be a part of any navigation system: multi-stop routing.

Navi is a mobile navigation application that allows the user to enter multiple places of interest or tasks then automatically generates the most time-efficient route from beginning to end. Using Swift and the Google Places API, Navi straight up worked on stage. Not only did this team show prowess, they showed us all how we can organize ourselves along the way.

Simplest

Succeeding

One of the tenets of Developer Camp is that simplicity sells. To do something better than the competition, sometimes all you need to do is remove a few steps from impulse to action.

Working in the iOS simulator and built using Swift, “Succeeding” is simple task management by priority. Check it out at http://www.succeeding.cirne.com.

Props

Loly

Beginning with a strong design for her own dating app, Adryenn was a woman with a mission from moment one. Undaunted by setbacks, she focused on the problem of disincentivized user behavior and clearly defined a niche for herself.

Loly.io is a blockchain-based dating application in partially-working form. Although the results were inconclusive, its creator deserved some recognition for continuing the pursuit of safe fun.

TODA Corporate Challenge

HyperLocal

Our marquee sponsors, TODA, set out a specific challenge that dared participants to use their blockchain to empower social interactions. Many tried, but one man learned it all and showed us how such a tool could be used in an emergency.

Using Mimik Edge SDK, Campbell designed the “Hyperlocal Impromptu Community” to discover people and make valuable local connections. Using TODAQ, a user could even put down a bounty to incentivize group behavior. The Mimik team awarded him the latest MacBook Air for his efforts, and the TODA team granted him $2000 worth of TODA Note cryptocurrency on top of that.

No wonder he looks so stoked in that picture.

TODAQ Corporate Challenge

User Friendly TODAQ

Our partner TODAQ, a portfolio company in the TODA Network, offered another corporate challenge. Niye Turner, Linux Mint in hand, accepted that challenge and shipped it to open source.

He created “storage for anything, an interface for the TODAQ protocol” and you can find it at: https://github.com/NiyeT/Todaq

He won his own stash of $2000 in equivalent Toda Note crypto. It feels like nothing can stop Niye, and we look forward to his continuing success.

World Changer Award

Deep Waste

He started winning Developer Camp showcases when he was nine. That was five years ago. Now he is organizing high school hackathons of his own. We expected great things, and we were not disappointed.

Yash began by demonstrating the scale of the landfill problem, and how human trash poisons our environment and oceans. Once we were hooked, he hit us with the “why” of the problem: sorting trash is difficult and confusing.

Then, he demonstrated a solution that uses the phone to identify recyclable material—and it totally worked.

My project, DeepWaste, is an easy to use mobile app that provides instantaneous feedback to users on how to accurately dispose of waste. DeepWaste applies deep convolutional neural network (CNN) to classify waste into recycling, compost or landfill.

The audience gasped. Yash is fourteen, and he gave us all a glimpse of the future once again. The world is changing, and perhaps for the better with kids like him forging ahead.

Runner Up

Helpful Award

Livi showed up early and immediately dedicated himself to setup and registration without being asked. Throughout the event, he looked for ways to help others—all while working on a team of his own.

Livi is someone we can see holds great promise as a Camp Counselor. He was awarded a Ledger Nano S, and a standard titanium cryptocurrency wallet to hold its backup key phrases.

For someone so dedicated this early in his career, it seems inevitable that Livi Poon will accrue the kind of currency that requires an industrial-strength wallet. Keep it up, Livi!

Grand Prize

Most Helpful

Jeremy began by coordinating with Amazon and Rent the Runway for some stellar prizes. Then he flew himself out from New York, put himself up, showed up early, and stayed late every day.

He worked registration, and helped out on numerous projects, always offering to have people work alongside him while they figured things out over time.

We can safely say that this event would not have been possible without our good friend Jeremy Johnstone. An expert coder (server-side and client-side), a distinguished organizer, and a winning team member, he proved once again what it takes to be a Camp Counselor.

He was awarded a Cryptotag Starter Kit, a high-quality titanium cryptocurrency wallet to symbolize his strength, resilience, and long-standing value that grows exponentially over time. Thank you, Jeremy!

We include everyone. Find out at our next event.

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Unleashing the Heroes was originally published in Developer Camp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What was the impetus for the TODA Protocol, and what do you see as the role of your team in the Open Source community?

Current blockchains have seen less than 0.2% global penetration. There are five technical necessities that are still missing and must be achieved for blockchain to get to the remaining 99.8%: security, efficiency, confidentiality, scalability, and interoperability. To achieve these necessities, blockchain needs the right foundation. TCP/IP is the foundation that allows the internet to exist and enables packets of data to be transmitted. However, these packets cannot effectively hold or transmit value, and solving this issue by design is the only way that mass adoption can be achieved. This solution must have all 5 of the key elements described — having only 3 or 4 is not enough. This is what we are working to solve with TODA.

Which leaders and visionaries do you follow, in this young industry with so many self-proclaimed experts?

We look for leaders with a bold vision who seek to maximize value for all stakeholders. This means creating value without extracting it from any socio-economic group that is being serviced. It means examining the core value model of projects people have worked on: who receives value, and who pays the cost? In the end, actions speak much louder than words, and those who are building systems that have lasting value and effective incentive alignment will have a truly global impact.

With so much speculation about the power of distributed ledger technology, how do you filter ideas and projects to avoid irrational exuberance?

We’re constantly searching for kernels of lasting value. After using decentralized technology in dozens of projects we’ve found that its primary benefit is reducing the costs that are caused by lack of trust within a system. So we start by trying to isolate areas of high cost and then work to reduce those costs by introducing an efficient means of verification. The TODA Protocol was created specifically for this purpose — and we complement it with additional tools and techniques for finding efficiencies.

Thanks to Toufi Saliba, the TODA.Network, and TODAQ for sponsoring Developer Camp 2019, Feb. 1–3 at Hero City in San Mateo.

You can do this. Get your ticket today.

• Find our Facebook page.
• Follow @iPhoneDevCamp on Twitter.
• Follow @DeveloperCamp on Instagram.
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• Learn more about past events.

Sponsor Q&A with TODA was originally published in Developer Camp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Square, Getaround, Temple Run, OAuth, TestFlight, push.io, and Zūm— each of these have foundations at Developer Camp over the past twelve years.

This event is a combination of community support, cooperation, and an idea contest that lasts 48 hours from opening doors to closing ceremony.

Apple, Oracle, Google, Amazon, Disney, and Facebook have purchased companies from the winning teams at Developer Camp. You could be next.

It is time to celebrate our inclusive, diverse, and equal-opportunity society with an event focused on foundational technologies: AI, VR/AR, and blockchain.

You can do this. Get your ticket today.

50% off for women and girls code — 2019LADIES

50% off for and students code — 2019STUDENT

The next big thing is waiting for us to discover — what will it be?

Developer Camp is a 48-hour hackathon and community event for beginners and experienced coders, held regularly in cities all around the world. It relies on a certain pattern to create trust and foster cooperation — right up until the presentations begin.

Our next event celebrates twelve years of open source contribution, community support from some of Silicon Valley’s most successful startups, and becoming the most diverse and inclusive culture of any technology event.

Who: Mentors

The elite corps of Developer Camp Counselors — winners of past events, and distinguished members of our community from the Bay Area stand by to teach and help.

Counsel

What: Hackathon

An inspiring, vigorous, collaborative event, that features superstar hackers and designers ready to help everyone learn to code, build custom hardware, and make ideas come to life.

Know

Where: Draper University’s Hero City, 55 East 3rd Street, San Mateo, CA

• February 1–3, 2019
• 5pm Friday to 7pm Sunday

Find

Why: Diversity

Over the past 12 years, Developer Camp has made its name celebrating the work of a wonderfully wide range of individuals and teams.

But you don’t have to take my word for it.

During this event, everyone can find a team so that all participants become successful. Even first time learners can get started with a few basic tools. You do not need to join a team, but it is nice to know that there are people ready to help.

Learn to code using the free Swift Playgrounds on iPad.

Swift Playgrounds - Preview

Discover a creative, passionate, persistent side of yourself that rocks.

The Success of Persistent Entrepreneurs

Join thousands of women and girls, men and boys, who have already shown that they can push their own expectations — and expand their identity — to become developers.

We will have activities and challenges for people of all ages to participate and achieve, such as Minecraft and other technical games and learning.

This event is made possible by a growing list of sponsors: Zūm, TODA & TODAQ, Amazon, Flutter, Nami, Tech Wild, Kintone, and Kryptonic.

Toda.Network | The Foundational Layer for Decentralized Networks

Tech Wild

Cloud Services - Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Kintone: No-Code Enterprise Application Platform for Teams

Community Partner

We also cooperate with Equals, Draper University, Singularity University, AppCamp4Girls, Girls Who Code, Women Who Code, and Black Girls Code.

Sponsor

Schedule

Friday

• 1700 — Doors Open
• 1700–1800 — Mixer
• 1800–1900 — Welcome and Introductions
• 1830 — Healthy Dinner
• 1900–2000 — Idea / Mentorship Pitches
• 2000 — Keynote by Janice Fraser
• Midnight — Doors Close

Saturday

• 0900–1000 — Continental Breakfast
• 1000–1300 — Introductions & Sponsor Presentations
• 1300–1400 — Healthy Lunch & Host Keynote
• 1400–midnight — Hacking and Learning with Informational Side Sessions
• 1800–1900 — Pizza Dinner
• Midnight — Doors Close

Sunday

• 0900–1000 — Continental Breakfast
• 1000–1400 — Prepare for Hackathon
• 1200 — Hackathon Entries due
• 1300–1400 — Family Style Lunch
• 1400–1700 — Hackathon Showcase
• 1700–1730 — Awards
• 1730–1800 — Pack It Up
• 1900 — Doors Close

Our goal is that everyone walks away with something — a prize, an opportunity, a new skill, or a new team.

50% off for women and girls code — 2019LADIES

50% off for and students code — 2019STUDENT

You can do this. Get your ticket today.

• Find our Facebook page.
• Follow @iPhoneDevCamp on Twitter.
• Follow @DeveloperCamp on Instagram.
• Sign up for our newsletter.
• Learn more about past events.

Developer Camp 2019, February 1–3 was originally published in Developer Camp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

For 48 hours, over a hundred strangers worked together to form over twenty great teams to demonstrate shared ideas in working form. Our theme for the event was The Pivot, as we approach an inflection point in the tech community from a so-called “broligarchy” to a more representative culture.

This was Developer Camp’s 10th Anniversary event, and we brought together our most diverse group of participants ever:

Continuing towards our goal, the gender ratio for this event was 40.4% female. Most importantly, it was a place and time where everyone felt safe to explore new ideas and rely on each other.

Sudha Jamthe on Twitter

devcamp It is common to hear females saying I don't have anything to contribute in a #devcamp and stay away. Here @iPhoneDevCamp u see a person saying it, then demoing their first swift app working w a fully functional interface. https://t.co/60sTOYHkS4

Our keynote speakers laid some wisdom on us, including alumna Nicole Lazzaro:

Augmented and virtual reality investor Amy LaMeyer gave us a glimpse of what’s coming as well as a bit of advice about new ways to experience music.

Olympic Champion Brian Boitano spoke about the pivots in his career, and how to overcome negativity and doubt under pressure:

Ayuna Vogel on Twitter

If you talk back to your negative voice, it will shut up", - winning tips from @BrianBoitano at the @iPhoneDevCamp this w/end 💯💯💯 https://t.co/r23ogLosJp

After coding and camping out all weekend, some of the most inspiring demonstrations we have ever witnessed led to 22 winners.

Awards

Most Potential

Act Busy

In order to avoid boredom and unwanted attention, this team built a simple game that makes it appear as if you are texting.

Best Family App

Armchair Traveler

This app helps families create live journals of their travels for loved ones.

Healthiest & Cloudinary API Award ($50)

FÜDIT

For those who prefer visual representations of meals, this app scans a menu (translating, if needed), presents photos, and represents them in augmented reality on the table. Cloudinary’s API Prize winner.

Most Social & Cloudinary API Award ($100)

Glimpse

A temporary network of specific moments such as food or views creates a sort of anonymous pen pal. This app allows for brief connections that time out, but the user may opt to continue. Runner up for Cloudinary’s API Prize.

Best Hardware & Cloudinary API Award ($50)

Hummingbird

Taking a DJI drone off the shelf, Developer Camp Counselor Eric Oesterle rigged a cinematic selfie program. Cloudinary’s API Prize winner.

Most Supportive Team & Cloudinary API Award ($50)

Image Wrangler Pro

A system for rapidly formatting and processing images with IPTC standard metadata straight off of a camera by using Cloudinary. Cloudinary’s API Prize winner.

Best New Developer

Music Effects

This is a fun musical challenge game for two players. Each player records a chosen song in his or her voice and the app decides the winner by comparing the singing to the original soundtrack.

Most Fun & Cloudinary API Award ($50)

Pawsy

A social network for furriends. This beautiful and simple interface helps dog owners choose the right pal for their pup. Cloudinary’s API Prize winner.

Best Student

PhonePal

This elegant experience translates speech from English to Hindi and back from Hindi to English in real time by using Siri, Google, and Apple speech APIs.

Best Concept

Smells Like Filtered Music

Be able to reset the search parameters for music based on mood and other factors.

Most Useful

SOS

Get out of an awkward situation with a simple fake phone call.

Most Educational

Splash

Splash is an educational web game that teaches children about the water cycle and pollution.

Best Utility

Tell Me

Easily listen to articles you find on the internet in the language and voice that you want.

Coolest

TriNetraApp

This app helps people learn names of objects and languages by using an impressive combination of Apple’s CoreML, ARKit, and an amalgam of Neural Network models — ResNet50, InceptionV3 and Yolo model.

Best Civic App

WeVote

We Vote cuts through the clutter to help you understand what’s on your ballot. This platform aggregates information and opinions across personal networks so you can help your friends become better voters in a non-partisan way.

Best Design

Work Week

Achieve better work life balance with automatic, private, and insightful time tracking.

Best Open Source & Cloudinary API Award ($100)

WriteBoard

This is a socially-driven, interactive free-speech wall—all anonymous and in the cloud. Runner up for Cloudinary’s API Prize.

Cloudinary API Award ($500)

Photobooth

This team produced a simple but elegant photobooth and Web photo editor powered by Cloudinary’s APIs. Cloudinary’s Grand API Prize winner.

Cloudinary API Award ($100)

Stories

This iOS app allows the user to create collaborative videos where anyone can add 1 or 2 seconds of recorded video to the end and then pass it on. Cloudinary’s API Prize winner. Runner up for Cloudinary’s API Prize.

Wildcard

Cloudinary App

Cloudinary App uses their API and iOS to transform photos or videos into visa pictures, profile pictures, fun pictures or video loops.

Best Volunteer

Tarwin Stroh

From the moment he arrived, on time for doors opening, to the last demo, Tarwin helped the organizers and the participants with social skills and software skills. Bravo!

Grand Prize

Most Helpful

Bill Coderre

Bill showed up ready to help, and improved almost everyone’s project in some way. After a lifetime at Apple, Bill not only lent a hand, but started porting a game he once wrote in LISP into iOS—which he demonstrated. His spirit and kindness represent the core of our values at Developer Camp. Thank you, Bill for showing us how.

Stay tuned for detail and updates on each of the winners in the weeks to come.

We include everyone. Look out for our next event.

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Mastering the Pivot was originally published in Developer Camp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

10 years of pioneering open source.
10 years of making real apps and services that people use.
10 years of friendship, support, and community.
10 years of success on the App Store and beyond.

It is time to celebrate our inclusive, diverse, and equal-opportunity society with a huge event that honors our past and pivots into the future.

You can do this. Get your ticket today.

50% off for women and girls code — 2017LADIES

50% off for and students code — 2017STUDENT

The next big thing is waiting for us to discover— what will it be?

Developer Camp is a 48-hour hackathon and community event for beginners and experienced coders, held regularly in cities all around the world. It relies on a certain pattern to create trust and foster cooperation — right up until the presentations begin.

Our next event celebrates ten years of open source contribution, community support from some of Silicon Valley’s most successful startups, and becoming the most diverse and inclusive culture of any technology event.

Who: Mentors

The elite corps of Developer Camp Counselors — winners of past events, and distinguished members of our community from the Bay Area stand by to teach and help.

Counsel

What: Hackathon

An inspiring, vigorous, collaborative event, that features superstar hackers and designers ready to help everyone learn to code, build custom hardware, and make ideas come to life.

Know

Where: PayPal Town Hall, San Jose, CA

• November 10–12, 2017
• 5pm Friday to 6pm Sunday

Find

Why: Diversity

Over the past 10 years, Developer Camp has made its name celebrating the work of a wonderfully wide range of individuals and teams.

But you don’t have to take my word for it.

During this event, everyone can find a team so that all participants become successful. Even first time learners can get started with a few basic tools. You do not need to join a team, but it is nice to know that there are people ready to help.

Learn to code using the free Swift Playgrounds on iPad.

Swift Playgrounds - Preview

Discover a creative, passionate, persistent side of yourself that rocks.

The Success of Persistent Entrepreneurs

Join thousands of women and girls, men and boys, who have already shown that they can push their own expectations — and expand their identity — to become developers.

We will have activities and challenges for people of all ages to participate and achieve, such as Minecraft and other technical games and learning.

This event is made possible by a growing list of sponsors: OCL, PayPal, Cloudinary, Harman, Redfin, and Tech Wild

• OCL
• Image and Video Upload, Storage, Manipulation, Optimization and Delivery
• Harman International | Connected Car | Lifestyle Audio Solutions
• San Jose, CA Real Estate & Homes for Sale | Redfin
• Tech Wild

We also cooperate with Equals, AppCamp4Girls, Girls Who Code, Women Who Code, and Black Girls Code.

Sponsor

Schedule

Friday

• 1700 — Doors Open
• 1700–1800 — Mixer
• 1800–1900 — Welcome and Introductions
• 1830 — Healthy Dinner
• 1900–2000 — Idea / Mentorship Pitches
• 2000—Keynote by Best Game Award-winning alumna and expert Nicole Lazarro on AR/VR in Games
• 2200 — Doors Close

Saturday

• 0900–1000 — Continental Breakfast
• 1000–1200 — Introductions & Keynote with Amy LaMeyer on AR/VR: A New Way to Experience Music
• 1300–1400 — Healthy Lunch plus Q&A with Brian Boitano on the Art of the Pivot
• 1400–14:30 —Video! What’s Next — Robert Moseley Director, Solutions Engineering @ Cloudinary will teach you what you need to know about video apis.
• 14:00–2200 — Hacking and Learning
• 1800–1900 — Pizza Dinner
• 2200 — Doors Close

Sunday

• 0900–1000 — Continental Breakfast
• 1000–1400 — Prepare for Hackathon
• 1200 — Hackathon Entries due
• 1300–1400 — Family Style Lunch
• 1400–1700 — Hackathon Showcase
• 1700–1730 — Awards
• 1730–1800 — Pack It Up
• 1800 — Doors Close

Our goal is that everyone walks away with something — a prize, an opportunity, a new skill, or a new team.

50% off for women and girls code — 2017LADIES

50% off for and students code — 2017STUDENT

You can do this. Get your ticket today.

• Find our Facebook page.
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• Learn more about past events.

Developer Camp 10th Anniversary Event was originally published in Developer Camp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Developer Camp met as a community in San Francisco over the weekend of February 24–26, and we all got another glimpse at the future.

Eric Oesterle on Twitter

@dom starts up #DevCamp 2017. We're building chatbots, image recognition apps, wearables, services, and hacking hardware. #DevCamp2017

Curtiss Pope on Twitter

DevCampSF @iphonedevcamp kicked off on Friday,with an inspirational opening by one of my favorite people @dom #winners #devcamp #devcamp2017 https://t.co/wrMckEWqAo

Soon everyone got the chance to offer their skills or ask for help on an idea.

Claire Comins on Twitter

Pitch time at @iPhoneDevCamp So many inspired ideas! #devcamp17

Developer Camp on Twitter

Eleven-year-old Yash pitching to a packed house in San Francisco. You can do this! https://t.co/m66ORpHrB2

Nilay Yener on Twitter

Friday @iPhoneDevCamp. Feeling so inspired

richard meyers on Twitter

@dom @nylcskn @filmfestnow @sujamthe @bhavana1110 @DevCamp @DevCamp2017 Very very much, looking forward to day 2 of Developers Camp!!

Do not get me started on Day 2, it was amazing. More later—but guess what? Everyone who participated in the Hackathon Showcase on Day 3 won something.

Award Winners

Best Civic Hack

Quarter Master

Here is an example of a person solving their own problem. Quartermaster provides an online system to organize, categorize, and easily check in/out shared gear. This is particularly useful in scouting, and gear management is required for advancement. Only an Eagle Scout would engineer and open source a solution on the Web.

• Sahas Munamala

Best Open Source

Character Namer

Once again solving a personal problem that creative writers all share, Character Namer is just that. It is an app that helps writers name characters with accurate information about name origins, meanings, and naming trends from different eras. With this award, we encourage the team to open source their work and continue.

• Elizabeth Coble
• Amanda Barden

Coolest

Pix Interactive

This app uses NEC image recognition as a means to tag locations the way you would with a QR code today. From the creator:

Use your smartphone as a window to free your pictures from their static confines so they can become interactive experiences. Targeted at everyone from individuals who print their own photos and photobooks to content creators and marketers who want to bring images alive, Pix Interactive lets you use your smartphone camera to identify an image and provide a caption and a link to more, related info on the Web.

So clever.

• Melissa Perenson

Best Communication Tool

StruggleBuddy

In the spirit of teams that have come before with this idea, StruggleBuddy takes the concept of a support chatbot one step further. This is an interactive support app promoting positive mental health using multiple tools: chat, forums, search, and phone.

This solution is great for those who need a response right away, or might feel more comfortable chatting than talking with a human right away. The team was generous enough to open source their work as well. So great.

• Natalie Focha
• Phuong Cooc
• Kadeem Palacios
• Mark Camara

Best Web App

Workout

One man built a real time running app that marks your current location and route on two different google static maps—and logs total distance travelled with calories burnt. From the creator:

You can also see your friends/competitors anywhere around the world. I used firebase authentication and real time database to save user data ie location etc and serve realtime fitness data from your fiends along with your so you can see who is winning on the Calorie Bern. My objective was to learn and get better grips with React with this project.

Right on.

• Jawad Banga

The NEC Computer Vision Prize

GoGetIt

This app helps you to create a shopping list by scanning the products themselves, reducing miscommunication about which exact type of food or medicine is needed. From the creator:

The way the app works is, the user of the app scans the product of his choice, then NEC API scans the product and updates the firebase database, and the other person who registered with the app gets notified and the list gets updated. So, no more typing, no more typos just scan and Go Get Going.

Working peacefully solo all weekend, this winner gave his work to open source. Kudos.

• Vishal Sanganaboina

Best Use of Firebase

Sightglass

This iOS app allows anyone to share their experience via video tagged to a specific destination. The results are sorted based on “vibe,” suited to the experience you are seeking. Thumbs up.

• Lyudmyla Ivanova
• Winnie Wen
• Vince Gutierrez
• Art Alacar

Best Design and Development

Sugar Hunt

SugarHunt allows you to socially discover ice cream in your local neighborhood in San Francisco. This team improved some open source and published their improvements for everyone to enjoy. Please, please ship this.

Claire Comins on Twitter

10pm curfew looms but the kids are still going strong #devcamp17 #hackathon @iPhoneDevCamp @dom

Claire Comins on Twitter

@iPhoneDevCamp @dom So exciting to see how far this team has come this weekend https://t.co/OGZTDGxp88

• Ajaypal Singh
• Vanessa Comins
• Emily Comins
• Charlotte Fletcher
• Santi Gracia

Most Educational

SPED Info for All

The world of individualized education plans is complex and challenging to communicate to parents. This app explains special education information for older students and parents. Created by a first-time programmer using Swift, a full-time teacher in special education got this impressive demo completed by himself in a weekend! Never give up.

• Juleus Chapman

The Sharing Award

ClipShow

This is a mobile solution to create and share clips from your favorite YouTube videos. The team worked diligently all weekend to completely implement this using the YouTube API and made it all open source. Boom.

Peer Dampmann on Twitter

Team brainstorming at #devcamp

• Manny Martinez
• Jay Hu
• Kei Sakaguchi
• John Regner
• Peer Dampmann

Best Family App

Home Autobots

This one-man team built the beginnings of his Home Automation solution, presenting a video to sum it all up. Bravo.

• Jacobs Matthews

Best Student App

Foundr

From the creator:

Foundr is a game that teaches kids the basics of entrepreneurship in a fun way while learning about math and science. Each challenge is designed to inspire budding entrepreneurs to think about solving a big problem facing our society. Player selects a challenge they want to solve in the world. Then they selects their team. Each team member that you adds lets you grow faster and if you grow faster your company will be more valuable. But having more team members mean you also have to share your equity with more people when your company is sold. Once the player selects the team, they then are taken through a series of facts about the challenge and maths problems related to the fact. The player earns revenue for the company. At the end of the challenge, player learns how much their company was worth based on their performance on the questions. Regardless of whether the company is old or folded, the player learns about the impact they made on the world by going through the challenge!

Built by an older brother for his sister’s education, this regular winner stole the show again by building it all using Adobe Experience Design. Well done!

• Amit Narayan
• Yash Narayan

Best Game

Scrabbit

At first glance, this app looks like any other Scrabble competitor, but this word game requires you to look around for the letters you need. As real-world as a spelling game can get—using image recognition as a glimpse into the future of immersive gaming. Brilliant.

• Jyoti Bishnoi
• Agata Krol
• Navjot Singh Matharu
• Anup Bishnoi

PubNub Fellows

MeetMeThere

MeetMeThere makes organizing meetings for small or large groups of people effortless. Share your location, invite your group, MeetMeThere does the rest.

Claire Comins on Twitter

@iPhoneDevCamp Kinda missing the invitations for coffee! Great experience building MeetMeThere with Dan Zeitman & @ChemaLopezp @PubNub @dom

MeetMeThere contacts everyone in your chosen group, finds the most central location for the meeting, and shows each person their own best route to get there in real time. Simply awesome.

Nat Focha on Twitter

Innovative group meet app idea developed by @clairecomins at @iPhoneDevCamp!!!!

• Jose Lopez
• Claire Comins
• Dan Zeitman (Mentor)

PubNub Fellows

OneCall

For certain legal circumstances, there is a select type of person who can help and represent you to law enforcement. This app crowdsources emergency services, allowing the caller to simultaneously notify a pre-defined community of people who can help you. For the benefit of all, this app is open source. This could be an actual lifeline.

• Rauhmel Fox
• Maria Claudia Bodino

Most Potential

Piper Team

Aged 9 and 6, the Sagolla boys got help from their grandmother and assembled a Piper minecraft computer.

Greg Keegstra on Twitter

@Dom @iPhoneDevCamp in full swing #hackathon

• Michelle Sagolla
• Leo Sagolla
• Ansel Sagolla

Our thanks to the judges, from the Camp Counselor program, and our sponsors Google, PubNub, and NEC.

This is just the beginning. These teams did all of this in less than 48 hours.

So can you.

Together, anything is possible.

Join us at our next event.

Developer Camp is a decade-long tradition of serious fun that has led to major contributions to Open Source and startup culture. We are constantly updating each other with opportunities, advice, and instruction. Stay tuned to the latest news using tools and services that our members have helped to build.

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Anything Is Possible was originally published in Developer Camp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

NEC provides an image object recognition engine which recognizes 2D objects such as product packages, posters, and paintings through a phone’s camera. This is very lightweight engine and easy to implement natively. The libraries for this API are available for Android right now — join our challenge and go for the NEC Prize!

NEC Corporation of America

48 hours straight to make something great.

The theme for this event is: Bots, Native Mobile, and the Web. Our sponsors will be on hand to help during the entire event. NEC Corporation is a leader in the integration of IT and network technologies that benefit businesses and people around the world. Special recognition will go to the participant with the best use of NEC’s API, and we promise the opportunities will continue.

Developer Camp is a worldwide network of entrepreneurs who gather regularly for a weekend hackathon that is unlike any other. Some events are hyper-competitive and focused on excellence or funding. Ours is different, more collaborative, more fun, and much more effective at identifying greatness.

Winners of our showcase have founded companies such as Square, Getaround, TestFlight, Sofa, Push.io & RelativeWave. TestFlight sold to Apple. Push.io sold to Oracle. Sofa sold to Facebook. RelativeWave sold to Google. Getaround just partnered with Toyota.

At our last event, Oren Jacob, CEO of PullString gave our keynote. Now Pullstring is leading the pack in user experience, and is currently on a roadshow with Amazon. At our upcoming event next weekend, our sponsor NEC is debuting a new computer vision API. Come check us out!

50% off for women and girls code — 2017WOMEN 50% off for and students code — 2017STUDENT

You can do this. Get your ticket today.

• Find our Facebook page.
• Follow @iPhoneDevCamp on Twitter.
• Sign up for our newsletter.
• Learn more about past events.

NEC to Launch Computer Vision API at Developer Camp was originally published in Developer Camp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.