Student programmers solve real-world challenges

An interface that allows hearing-impaired people to communicate with others using an augmented-reality environment took home the grand prize of $25,000 in the eighth annual Imagine Cup Worldwide Finals in Poland, a prestigious international programming contest for high school and college students.

Team Skeek, a team of university students from Thailand, was responsible for the project, which also took first place in the software design category.

The winning project, eyeFeel, allows hearing-impaired people to communicate with others using an augmented-reality environment that combines speech and face recognition, converts it to English from text, and generates virtual conversation text balloons and sign language animation in real time.

“We wanted to implement something that would have a unique impression on the user and also be fun to use,” said Pichai Sodsai of team Skeek, who attends Kasetsart University. “We dared to dream and worked hard to make it come true.”

This year’s Imagine Cup, sponsored by Microsoft Corp., began with a field of more than 325,000 high school and university students representing more than 100 countries and regions and culminated with a weeklong celebration in Warsaw. During the week, students demonstrated their real-world solutions to challenges using Microsoft products and competed for cash prizes totaling $240,000 across five competition categories and six awards. This year’s projects primarily focused on solving challenges in education, health care, and the environment.

“We have a dream that all students will be equal in the classroom,” said team member Pichai Sodsai. “That’s why we built eyeFeel.

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Team Skeek said they will keep working on eyeFeel to bring it to market. Currently, eyeFeel only supports English, so the team’s next step is to embed Thai-language support.

Team SmarterME from Taiwan, the winning team in the Embedded Development category, wants to help consumers keep an eye on power-hungry appliances. The team developed its Smarter Meter project after one of its members received a sky-high electricity bill, said Yi-Sheng Lai, a student at National Chiao Tung University.