At the core of VisionDevCamp is the Hackathon (Wikipedia entry). Attendees group together in teams to create and demo an application at the event. Applications are placed into categories and teams win awards and prizes for their entries. Most people form teams after arriving with people they’ve never met before. Sometimes an established team will attend together.
At our DevCamp events we want to reward attendees who represent the following values:
- Contribution: by assisting the commons, offering value, and in general by being useful.
- Sharing: by offering help, sharing code or expertise, or by assistance in testing or debugging.
- Openness: by asking good questions, by answering them, by being open to people and ideas, and by making source code available.
- And of course, by demonstrating a “Can Do” attitude.
As with our prior events, we’ll be handing out “tickets” when we see participants demonstrating these values. Then on Sunday, each team that participates by presenting during the Hackathon Demos will also receive a ticket. These tickets will be used by raffle for many of the General Prizes — the more tickets you have, the more likely you’ll receive a General Prize.
Structure
Team Forming: Friday evening and Saturday morning, there will be open mic times to make announcements if you’re forming a team, looking for talent, or wanting to join a team. If you are having a hard time making connections, please find one of the VisionDevCamp staff and we’ll help you find some people who need you. You may also wish to form a team prior to the event.
Team Focus Time: Teams will assemble and work on their projects for the majority of the event. Most of the time will be unstructured for teams to work together in preparation for the Hackathon Demos on Sunday.
Entry Deadline (in-person): Teams wishing to demo and compete for awards will need to submit an entry form no later than 2pm PT on Sunday. A link will be provided during the event. If there are more submissions then what we have time to demo, submissions that offer source code will be given first priority, then submissions that the moderators think are “cool”. While you’re waiting, help us rearrange the venue for the Hackathon Demos.
Entry Deadline (satellite event): Remote teams attending any of the Satellite Events may submit a demo. This will require submitting a video of the demo. The Satellite Event demos will be included in the in-person demos and these teams will be eligible for the Satellite Events awards.
Hackathon Demos: The demos will take place in the main area of the venue. Demos should be around 3 minutes, so practice your presentation before you get to the podium. We’ll will have multiple projectors set up so that we can transition from demo to demo quickly. Please use the standard screen mirroring feature of the Apple Vision Pro to demonstrate most of the features if at all possible, as we will only have one display system in the venue.
Hackathon Judging: After the demos are completed, the event moderators will take a break to consult about the winning demos. Winners are selected at the sole discretion of the event staff, unless it’s a special co-sponsored award category, which will include sponsor representatives to help select the winners for those categories.
Ceremony – Special Awards: The more valuable prizes given to us by our Sponsors will be given out for each of the Special Award categories. Each Special Award Sponsor will have the opportunity to say some words and personally give the reward to the winner if they are present. At their discretion, the event staff may also allow some others who did not demo the opportunity to get a chance to win a Special Award if they demonstrated values of sharing, participation, and “can do” attitude during the event.
Ceremony – Sponsored Awards: Sponsored awards will be given out for each of the sponsored awards categories.
Ceremony – General Awards: Some of the more desirable General Prizes will be given out by random draw to those who participated in the Hackathon. Any remaining General Prizes will be given out to those holding the most tickets.
Clean Up & Go Home: You can help us by cleaning up the space generously offered us by our venue sponsor. Source code and demos will be released to the public that evening.
General Prize Eligibility
Everyone is eligible for the General Prizes — you just have to earn a ticket.
Special Awards Eligibility:
- First, to be eligible for a Special Award, the application must not currently be available via the Apple App Store OR if it is available, you must have source code available on a public website.
- Next you must sign up for the Hackathon by the deadline
- You must have demonstrated your application during the Demos. Remember, if there are too many submissions, the Hackathon moderators may have to make a judgment call as to what applications will make the cut to be demonstrated. If you don’t make the cut, you can’t win a Special Award, but you are still eligible for General Awards.
- The staff of the event are not eligible for any of the Special Awards.
Special Awards Criteria
- There will be a number of categories of Special Awards, each will have different requirements as set by the Special Award Sponsor.
- In general, applications in most categories will be judged on not only on their function, but also if they are fun & cool.
- We also value applications with simplicity and elegance.
- We will give special recognition to applications that were developed during VisionDevCamp. You may bring applications and data developed prior to the camp — as we recognize that spatial computing software is complex and requires more work than an average app. Simply disclose this information to the judges for consideration.
- We also give priority to applications that offer source code under an open source license, however, this is NOT a requirement to win.
- Applications do not have to be “finished” to win — we would rather you demonstrate what your application can do well, rather then worry about what may be not complete.
Awards Categories
To be announced. Check back later.
Prizes
To be announced. Check back later.