The GIG group organized last friday, May 20th an experimental session of interHACKt, an event meant to be a meeting point for people interested in exploring and experimenting together interesting topics, with a focus on interaction, but not limited to it.
Being still at an experimental stage, we only invited a small group of people that we believed to be among those who have the hacking spirit we think it should be in the core of these sessions. The idea was to assess if the concept is interesting enough to consider repeating and expanding the audience.
In this first session, preparation started two weeks before, where a poll ran during a week for people to choose the topic of the session. After the first week, the topic was closed on Kinect (other topics considered that will probably make it to other sessions were Arduíno, Android, HTML 5 and GPGPU).
During the second week, an online document was shared among the participants, where everyone could add information and ideas for projects they would like to try out.
When the event finally started, everyone shared what they knew about the topic, and discussed the proposals that were in the shared document. Three groups were created, and each group explored one of the topics. In the process, the online document served as a "shared board" and was enriched with inputs from everyone.
In the end, everyone knew how to install Kinect software and testing samples, and the groups explored a 3D reconstruction demo, and started developing two simple concepts from scratch using OSCeleton and Processing: a Kinect-controlled Pong, and a virtual drumset.
We will now be evaluating what can be improved, but the overall feedback is positive, so we will definitely consider a second session.
If you think you have the spirit and would like to be informed of the next session, e-mail us at gig at fe dot up dot pt, with the subject "Interested in interHACKting", and let us know why you would like, and propose one or two topics of your liking.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank DEI for sponsoring our coffee and cookies 🙂