Meet the Winners of Seattle Interactive Conference’s Wearables Hackathon

The Seattle Interactive Conference’s Mobile App Wearables Hackathon took place this past weekend at REACTOR and tonight, finalists gave their presentation to a panel of judges. AT&T was on hand to sponsor the event and to introduce it’s M2X platform, a cloud-based data storage service and management toolset built for the Internet of Things.

Tonight, the winners were announced and top prize went to team “hackcouture.io” who built a gesture-detecting glove capable of playing air guitar — but you could easily imagine being applied to industrial field service applications, control interfaces for cyclists, input devices for use with sign languages and for various training scenarios.

To build their prototype, the team wired up some a Raspberry Pi, wifi module and battery pack to a custom-made glove which was laced with conductive fingertip pads. In addition to conductive touch sensing, the device used RFID and even a Pebble Watch to create other ways to sense and communicate with the outside world. An iOS app created the interactive experience (in this case a guitar game.)

24-hour hack-a-thons are challenging, especially when working with a lot of disparate pieces of hardware that weren’t necessarily designed to play well together. According hackcounture.io iOS developer Phil Kast “the pi’s web server blew up sun afternoon so Choong and Daniel had to track down the issue and rewrite it Monday night.”

Other finalists at the event included Runner Groove, Coach 2.0, Goal Physics and Surveillance For Puppies.

Congrats to hackcouture.io (Adam Smith-Kipnis, Phillip Kast, Daniel Herrera, Vaibhav Vaidya, Erin Weathers, Choong Ng and several other helpers)!

Photo credits: Phil Kast and Hack Things