I participated in the 2018 Seattle VR Hackathon and had a great time, as always. I worked on a project that we called Bubble.io for the brand new Magic Leap One augmented reality headset! The main premise is that the headset would be worn by someone with trouble hearing, and the system would listen to what was being said and then put up speech bubbles next to the person speaking. This would allow the person to participate in the conversation.

Our project won the prize for “Outstanding Novelty”!

On our research on the topic, we found some pretty distressing statistics about depression in the elderly who are hard of hearing and those who choose not to wear hearing aids. I’ll add another post with a video demo of our project.

If you’re around Sep 27, you should think about attending the Seattle VR Meetup at the Pacific Science Center. Many of the projects that were built at the hackathon will be available to try out.

For now, here’s a video compilation of some small clips of most of the projects from this hackathon.