Big win for Lethbridge College research chair at MIT Hackathon
LETHBRIDGE — One of Lethbridge College’s own has returned from a prestigious competition in Boston with impressive accolades. Mike McCready, the college’s President’s Applied Research Chair in Virtual and Augmented Reality, was one of just 350 people chosen from around the world to take part in the annual Reality Hack: MIT XR Hackathon, hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His team earned first place honours in two categories and placed in the top 10 overall.
Attendees can arrive to the hackathon with ideas, but no other work completed. They then form teams of two to five people with complete strangers and have three days to create an original extended reality (XR) project. Over three days, McCready’s five-person team developed an app for children with dyslexia that helps to develop their letter formation and word recognition skills. It was awarded first place in both the Education and Learning and the Health and Wellness categories.
“I really wanted to work on a project that focused on dyslexia,” says McCready. “I looked at what virtual reality technology offered and I saw that it had some really strong capabilities to work on gross motor skills and speech recognition, and we were able to use those attributes to develop a solid project.”
Participants came from 49 countries around the world. McCready’s team included Taylor Gilbert from Austin, Texas, April Speight from Hollywood, Calif., Logan Smith from Portland, Ore. and Kai Curtis from Seattle, Wash. The team worked for 15 to 17 hours per day to plan, create and test the app, which they named Spell Bound.