Meet the Winners of Sony Spresense University Program 2023!
We're excited to announce the winners from Hackster's "Hack in a Box" campaign as part of the Sony Sensing Solution University Program.
From March 2023 to February 2024, Hackster facilitated a university outreach program, called "Hack in a Box," for Sony Semiconductor Solutions Group (SSS) to share the Sony Sensing Solution University Program (SSUP) across the United States and Europe.
This program included the recruitment process of school affiliates to apply to use Spresense “Hackathon Kit” to build applications. The school affiliates were asked to incorporate Spresense hardware into coursework, organize technical workshops, and/or a hackathon to enable students to build projects leveraging Spresense capabilities.
A total of 43 applications from 37 schools from Hackster’s global community were received, and four universities were chosen as “Hackathon Kit” winners. The students from the four universities would learn to develop with Spresense and then compete for a final prize to win PS5 and VR2.
Here are the highlights and recaps...
Delft University of Technology
Students from the Delft University of Technology participated in a Spresense Hackathon that took place on Friday, September 15th in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering. Read about the Hackathon here. A wide range of project ideas were developed from glasses designed to alert individuals with hearing impairment to sounds in their environment, advanced tracker for athletics, cat repeller, budget audiophile, etc.
University of Wisconsin-Madison
University of Wisconsin-Madison’s "One Health Makeathon" used Spresense in their interdisciplinary hackathon hosted at the school's makerspace from September 29th to October 1st, 2023 to develop solutions for high-risk populations due to escalating heat challenges. “Bucky-et Air Conditioner” by Jerry Miao won the local prize. Miao's innovative creation offers an environmentally conscious cooling solution. Read more about the Makeathon here.
Stanford University
Stanford University’s XR Club hosted the “Immerse The Bay” Hackathon November 10th-12th. This three-day, open-door event brought together a community of VR/AR students to collaborate on cutting-edge XR projects. To facilitate students' participation in the hackathon. Sony's Armaghan and Jinger Zeng from the Hackster team led an ideation workshop introducing the hardware to the students. The workshop was also joined by Pete Warden, CEO of Useful Sensors, and previously the technical lead on the TensorFlow mobile team at Google. As the pioneer of tinyML, Warden gave students an overview of the current state-of-the-art technology, encapsulating LLM capabilities into a wallet-sized board running locally without the internet. Read more here.
University of Maryland
University of Maryland’s professor Huaishu Peng incorporated Spresense in his CMSC730 human-computer interaction (HCI) graduate course. The course consists of four modules, including prototyping, mini-competitions, and a semester-long project exploring ubiquitous computing, wearables, virtual/augmented reality, haptics, tangible UIs, accessibility, and interactive fabrication. Students first time got introduced to leveraging Spresense's advanced DSP capabilities to develop human-machine interaction projects.
After these universities each held their own workshops, coursework, and hackathons, the students were invited to submit their final projects on Hackster to compete against each other for the program's final prize.
And the grand prize winner goes to the humming robot project from University of Maryland! The prizes will go to Smart Artifacts Lab for advanced interactive research purposes and we can't wait to see the future projects where technology and creativity will converge and birth!
Thank you to all participants from this year and the faculties from the universities who contributed significant amounts of resources to support this program, please follow Sony’s platform hub for more upcoming events and activities.