Kinomotion / Angelhack Bangalore

Jun 22, 2013

3 minutes read

I had heard of Angelhack before. When I found that they’re doing a hackathon in Bangalore, I was psyched. I registered about 2 weeks before the event.

I thought I’d meet some cool people from around Bangalore - which I did. And participating in a hackathon was something I had never done before. Another motivation was to figure out how image processing can be done on android devices.

The event

The hackathon was done at Microsoft’s startup accelerator in Bangalore. The venue was pretty good. A huge room for us to sit/sleep in, a cafeteria and a recreation room (pool, xbox, foosball, et al).

Meals were served. They called us for ‘breakfast’ - but no one really cared whether it was breakfast or lunch. It was food - yummy! Time to get back to work.

Quite a few people decided to stay up all night and work on things. I was one of them.

Kinomotion

I made a prototype app that lets you create cinemagraphs on the run. Cinemagraphs are those cool animated images where everything is frozen except for one element in the image (like the hair, water, trees, etc).

My app had some really powerful features that let you create cinemagraphs with precision (brushes, erasers, the whole shebang).

I had initially hoped to use OpenCV on Android - but after almost 4 (precious) hours of toil, I couldn’t get it working on my phone. I decided to use the Android’s native drawing capabilities instead of OpenCV.

The advantage to that is, Android API calls are automatically hardware accelerated - so the prototype I made was SUPER fast (at least compared to what I had in mind). It was realtime feedback.

There were other problems I solved along the way - like generating .gif files on a phone, a bit of math to get brushes and erasers working, etc.

Shoutout to Anup, for helping me with the name!

Other interesting ideas

I met some really cool people at the event. Working on machine learning, retail solutions, web portals, augmented reality, natural language processors (in chat!). I’m glad to have been in such an environment.

Everyone there had their toolset ready to go - I learned a few new things while being there as well!

The demo

The panel of judges included VCs from around India. Bharati Jacon (of seedfund), Mukund Mohan (CEO of the Microsoft Startup Accelerator), Vineet Deviah (founder of teliportme),

That’s me demoing Kinomotion after 24 hours of writing code!

Demoing Kinomotion at Angelhack Bangalore

I had 2 minutes to pitch. I had tried to use my app to generate some really cool cinemagraphs from around the venue. Turns out that was a good idea! People really liked the concept and asked quite a few questions.

The judges seemed intrigued by the idea and were excited. They were assigned 1 minute for questions - but they went over quite a bit. I had a decent roadmap for the prototype as well - so that a good too.

The results

Turns out I won the hackathon! The ‘prize’ for this was being part of Angelhack’s Hackcelerator in San Fracisco. There would be an opportunity to pitch to VCs in the silicon valley and also attend Techcrunch Disrupt. I can’t wait for ‘The Silicon Valley Experience’ - as Angelhack calls it. Teams from around the world would reach there - and that would be awesome.

I had never thought I would be the one who gets to go!