In November 2021, Cloudinary teamed up with Dolby.io to participate in their Build the World With Dolby.io Hackathon aimed at sparking spectacular and innovative hybrid audio- and video-conference experiences. Invited were developers and creators from around the world to compete for a prize pool valued at over $25,000. Not only did the hackathon grant those professionals the opportunity to supercharge their projects' media assets with Cloudinary’s unique features, but it also enabled them to join a series of talks given by Cloudinary's resident media experts: Tessa Mero, Becky Peltz, Paige Drake, and Scott Wachtmann.
Unique to this event was a series of Side Quest Challenges offered by Dolby.io and Cloudinary as an opportunity for each and every registered hackathon participant to win a prize.
“We wanted the hackathon program to give out more prizes to everyone who participates. So many times the build-up to the final awards can become anticlimactic with just a few high-value prizes, but we desired to reward developers for their engagement throughout the hackathon.” — Dan Zeitman, Dolby.io
Cloudinary stepped up by offering unique Side Quest challenges for completing mini-challenges with Cloudinary's APIs. Also through Cloudinary’s APIs, the hackathon participants uploaded and stored their project’s media assets—an intuitive, simple, and efficient process.
Developers learned about the Side Quest Challenges in weekly office hours.
In parallel, Dolby.io asked developers to resolve the “new normal” problem of combining real-world and virtual communications into more engaging experiences. In response, the participants took the post-pandemic theme to heart and presented amazingly innovative ways for people to collaborate online.
Today, we’re extremely proud to announce the hackathon winners.
Office Talk, Grand-Prize Winner
Office Talk is a virtual office with multiple types of rooms that simulate a lifelike environment. Impressively, React developer Arjun Ganesan reimagined virtual workspaces, delivering a captivating user experience that’s reminiscent of the popular coworking locations that were extremely popular in prepandemic times, whereby people could find community and build personal networks in physical settings.
Arjun’s virtual workspace brings forth that same energy by leveraging the new spatial audio-placement feature of Dolby.io’s Communications APIs to simulate the effect of being in an office in which you can hear others working in the background. What’s more, you can easily upload and share media through Cloudinary's Rest APIs.
React Room, Dolby.io Honorable Mention
React Room is a web-based audio-video conferencing application that offers an immersive and personalized user experience with Dolby's Communications APIs. Notably, React developer Kunal Sangtiani built an assistant that responds to voice commands with actions. In addition, React Room has an adaptive user interface that adjusts to instances, such as changes in the number of participants and customizable themes.
Celebirthday
If orchestrated well, birthday celebrations are an excellent forum in which to express love; serenade life; and share gifts, memories, blessings, and best wishes. However, no thanks to the pandemic, virtual birthday celebrations have become relatively robotic and bland. Celebirthday is a virtual space for commemorating birthdays while conducting real-time conversations with friends, colleagues, and family.
"We felt a strong need for a birthday-themed meta space that does not feel like just another online meeting and that can actually be riveting and engrossing." — Taimoor Ali and Azan Bin Zahid, Celebirthday developers
Edurizon: Igniting a Better Future
Saloni Parekh, Nikhil Singh, and Shreya Maheshwari, a team of ingenious developers, created a one-stop web app for smooth collaboration in virtual learning. From a seamless video-conferencing forum to an interactive office-hours meetup, Edurizon makes remote learning fun.
"The ongoing pandemic has made virtual education the new normal, and teachers and students alike have become used to it. However, digitalization alone does not give them the feel of actually interacting with one another as in offline mode." — Edurizon developers
Aichatforest
The metaphor of a "forest" refers to a group chat in which you "grow" conversations. With Aichatforest, you can talk with others in an interesting and open forum of your choice.
"Before the pandemic, our group of friends would hang out, shoot the breeze, joke around, and catch up. We can now relive those experiences on Aichatforest." — Jeremy D. Higgs, Aichatforest developer
For more details on the hackathon winners, see this Dolby.io blog.
