We asked everyone, what's a moment from this weekend that you're grateful for? And created a collection of memories that we can preserve for years to come.
We love hackathons; however, we hate how after hackathons it was really hard to remember what the experience was like (especially considering the sleep deprivation!). Audio is magical. Two of our teammates, Thomas & Dieter, have been recording a weekly podcast together for the past two years (with over 100 episodes), and they've found it's a great way to preserve their stories of their time collaborating together. We built this tool to give everyone at this event the opportunity to easily collaborate on a artifact of our time together at MHacks this weekend.
Michigan Magic is a mixed reality experience that transports you to your time at MHacks 16. You're surrounded by orbs which contain attendees' favourite experiences from the weekend. Within the virtual reality experience, users have the ability to upload their experience into an orb that is shared with the entire community.
We built this project using A-Frame (webXR), Node.js (API for file uploads), and AWS S3 (hosting for audio files). For us it was a great opportunity to learn more about designing 3D user interfaces. It was also super interesting to learn about all the cool web APIs that make this sort of possible!
It's a stereotypical one but our biggest challenge was finding inspiration / an idea that got us all excited. We started with the idea of building a post-Sam Altman themed game where you were the CEO of OpenAI and were competing . A couple team members lost enthusiasm for the idea because they had already worked extensively with the GPT 3 set of APIs and craved something new, so we pivoted and built this tool instead.
Above everything else, I think we're proud ourselves for being flexible and for being able to get something together that we're all proud of. We've completed the game and it works great on both mobile and desktop! The tool brought a lot of joy to our team and to other teams who have tried it.
Time will tell... but we definitely love VR and want to keep building for it. For Michigan Magic specifically, we imagine this as a tool that MHacks attendees will come back to for weeks, months, and years to come to tell the story of this magical weekend we had together.
