This past weekend, I had the opportunity to attend the first AEC Hackathon of the Year, and what a great experience it has been to join so many enthusiastic hackers trying to go outside of the usual to blow our minds.
The Hackathon started on Friday, where we got to mingle, share some ideas and the expertise that everybody in the room had. We got to see the many toys that some of the guys from Roger O’Brien Construction brought in order to play with, and of course hack them in their best way to win the Hackathon. I liked the fact that there was a lot of fraternity in sharing the use of the toys with everybody, that everybody was so excited for the next day when the initial starting flag was going to be shown.
I noticed a lot of interest on propositions to make better the way that things happen on the job site and from a robotic superintendent to affordable laser scanning tool using Google Project Tango.
On Saturday, I got the opportunity to share with some of the people curious about 3D web and the web services that Autodesk has to offer. I did a quick presentation of the Viewer and Data API with a room filled with many enthusiasts, which got me started with a lot of excitement to show what this was all about.
We had many people asking really good questions and also very hungry for information on how to get started. I got the opportunity to go over some of the samples we have in the Github Repository for the Viewer and Data API with the participants which they enjoyed a lot.
We also had the visit from NYC’s first CTO Minerva Tantoco, which was one of the judges for the Hackathon. After hours of hacking from Saturday until 1pm on Sunday the time to start presentations was due.
The first ones were Punchbot, an onsite robotic superintendent which did the integration of the Social media job-site platform that FieldLens offers and the SDK of Double Robotics. It was very nice to see how quickly they were able to overcome the many roadblocks that the SDK of Double Robotics gave them to successfully finish on time.
The following ones in the presentation were two awesome engineers from Beck, they brought a couple of project tango tablets to hook it up with Revit and give the project user the ability to see the model they scanned on the inside of the place where the Hackathon was being hold. Incredible outcome they had and very cool integration ended up giving them one of the prices of the Hackathon.
The winners of the overall Hackathon categories was VRX which did an integration using Google Cardboard with Revit to be able to walk around the model selected.
There were many more presentations but for that here is the video for you to enjoy it at your own pace.
Thank you to the organization of the Hackathon everything went really smooth and precise and I couldn’t be happier with the outcome of my first time attending an event like this.
See you guys in Chicago for the next AEC Hackathon.