LIT Thurles team take games prize at Imagine Cup

Building 3, Microsoft.
Photo: Wiki Commons

At lunchtime in Microsoft’s Sandyford offices in Dublin this Tuesday teams of young people gathered in corners, and around half eaten sandwiches, to talk in hushed tones. This was their last chance to prepare before the judging started.

The Imagine Cup is Microsoft’s annual competition for software innovation by students from across the Island. I had come for the games but stayed for some of the extraordinary apps on offer.

After a morning spent casually talking about their ideas in the brightly lit presentation room at the rear of Microsoft’s Building 3, the reality of the situation had set in. They were here from colleges across the country to pitch their ideas to a panel of judges from academia and industry.

These were the people who could take their ideas from a pastime to a product that they could sell. This is a high-stakes competition, and despite the shy smiles you could tell the pressure was on.

Stephen Howell (@saorog) is Academic Engagement Manager at Microsoft. He organised this year’s competition and he agrees that the set up is an intimidation one - “This is the only way to really put them on the spot.” he said as he showed me into the judging rooms.


World citizenship
IME, a team from Queen’s University Belfast, were first in the firing line in the World Citizenship category. The Imagine Cup is split into three categories - Games, Innovation and World Citizenship. The teams were funnelled through a narrow corridor and into glass walled presentation rooms that just managed to not feel cramped.

Photo: IME on Facebook

IME, or In My Experience, is an app, a set of tools for people dealing with depression.
The team Fiona Connolly, Natascha McBrien, Niamh McCann and Bronagh McCoy are in the final year of Computer Science in Queen’s.

Fiona and Bronagh talked me through the layout. Right now the app is built around journaling software. People attending counselling are asked to keep track of their moods and the events that trigger them whether good or bad. The app tracks your stats over time and makes presenting that info to your councillor easy.

The idea is to build a one stop shop allowing people to save their favourite songs and videos into the app, and to provide tips and advice through the app too.

Giving people advice about their mental health is a serious responsibility but the team have thought of that. They’ve been working with psychologists and councillors to make sure they get this right. This may not be the most commercially viable app, but it is a simple idea done well.

Innovation
Another good idea, the sort of idea that’s so obvious you’ll find yourself wondering why no one has thought of it before, came from Cork Institute of Technology’s team Falcon.



The team, headed up by Robert Gabriel (you can find the rest of the team in the video above), are building a new rendering engine. Robert says the technology could be used by streaming video services like Netflix and YouTube to resize video to suit your device. That means vastly reduced video being streamed to your mobile for example.

The idea is that this will make your stream faster and more reliable, but also save you and the streaming service money by taking up less bandwidth.

Why don’t they already do this? Team Falcon aren’t sure, but they’ve done their homework and there’s nothing else out there like their product.

Games
On the games side, an interesting project in the World Citizenship category was by the Dundalk IT team of fourth year Computing in Game Development students Colm Grogan, Cian McCormack, Hugh Thornton, and Ze Hou Zhang. Team Symbiote’s NyX project is a set of tools to gamify exercises for people with multiple sclerosis using Microsoft’s Kinect.

But when it comes to fun, Team Alt-Tab’s CavernNauts was the standout game on the floor. Wedged in the corner at the back of the room, team members Ger Stone and Joseph Bentley talked me through the game before the judging began.

It's a simple 2-player co-op game with hints of PixelJunk Eden. CavernNauts tasks players with retrieving a giant diamond from the depths of a cave and manoeuvring it back to the surface.

It can be played alone but is at its best when two people work together, using ropes and grapples, to haul their prize - and each other - through the simple 2-D maze.

The team cleverly identified the fun of the mechanics from a game they worked on previously and then built CavernNauts around the idea of swinging and grappling. The level I played was a simple introduction but Alt-Tab have already iterated on the idea. In a second level which I watched the developers play, a layer of complexity was added requiring the players to regularly top up their oxygen supply while avoiding traps on the map.

Developer Ger Stone said that they hope to add competitive death-match modes too. It's early days, but CavernNauts has the makings of a really great game.

Alt-TAB were the only one of my picks to win at this year’s event. They’re off to the finals at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond in Seattle.

Congrats to LIT Tipperary students who won the National Imagine Cup with CavernNauts-Microsoft Seattle here we come pic.twitter.com/VBzK4jBFv3
— LIT (@LimerickIT) March 5, 2014