HopHacks: 3 winners from 27 teams at second Johns Hopkins hackathon

Nearly 180 students registered for the second HopHacks at the Johns Hopkins University, the 36-hour-long hackathon that concluded Sunday when 86 students split among 27 teams presented completed projects.
While the first HopHacks event was limited solely to Johns Hopkins students, this hackathon was open to other schools, and students from local universities — Loyola University Maryland, Goucher College, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County — as well as students from Rutgers University and the University of Pennsylvania also participated. The student organizers of HopHacks had arranged for a visiting students’ sleeping room to ensure no student would have to pay for lodgings.
As was the case in the first hackathon in September 2013, three winners received cash prizes. The information on the student projects below comes from Rebecca Wilson, a HopHacks co-organizer and a 19-year-old computer science major.

• First prize of $1,024: SoundCave used the Oculus Rift virtual reality helmet to create a 3D game environment that responds to the changes in the music the user is listening to. Certain objects would change with the bass beats, while other objects would move more quickly if the song’s tempo picked up.
• Second prize of $512: ShatteredGlass is for Google Glass wearers who are determined to wear their high-tech spectacles while driving. By using Glass features such as GPS and the accelerometer, the app can detect when a Glass wearer experiences a car accident (or a situation like it), at which point data about what has been going on is sent to a server and a video begins recording. The goal is to alert emergency units to dispatch to the scene of an accident quickly even if the driver is incapacitated. Students tested ShatteredGlass by running around the Hopkins quad.
• Third prize of $256: WinSight is a system for picking enemies and heroes in the “Dota 2” and “League of Legends” games based on optimization techniques. The app takes an automatic screen capture of a game player’s hero selection screen, identifies the five opposing enemy-heroes and then presents a set of five heroes for a person’s team to pick and fight with. The students behind WinSight said the app didn’t guarantee wins, but did strongly increase a person’s chances of winning a game.