Teams from IPD Chair rock the Microsoft Imagine Cup 2015

It started in 2003 with a simple idea by searching for new ways to enthuse of students all around the world for new technologies. Microsoft Imagine Cup will be held in 2015 for 13th time. The goal to inspire junior developer and challenge at the same time to measure their technical abilities in a competition with other students. With creativity and modern technologies to improve the world. This year, our teams Dogma, enCourage and Symbiosis won all three categories innovation, world citizenship and games of the German finals and advanced to the worldwide semifinals.

Three creative concepts for the international stage

Team Dogma (Jannis Rätz, Josua Meier, Lennart Gienger) won the 1st place in the innovation category with their project CoZyPut (Cognitive Systems Input Solution). The three computer science students won in February 2015 the Microsoft Blueprint Challenge and money prize of 3.000 $.

CoZyPut (Cognitive Systems Input Solution) is a desktop app which uses the Kinect v2 for Windows to enable severely physically disabled people who have lost control of their extremities to play video games. Using single arm gesture control, eye tracking and even tongue control, we have made it our mission to bring gaming to everyone. CoZyPut brings video games to an entirely new audience. Naturally, this results in an entirely new user experience as well. We spent a lot of time talking to potential users to gain insight into what they like the most about our project and what they would use it for. One big factor is entertainment. When you cannot move your limbs, your entertainment possibilities are very limited. It is even worse if you are a resident at an understaffed nursing home with nobody who tends to you. In that case, you will spend the entire day doing nothing but passively lying in bed and watching TV. CoZyPut provides an active entertainment alternative, something a lot of our users long for.

Team enCourage (Cole Bayley, René Brandel, Tobias Röddiger und Dominik Doerner) won the world citizenship category. Their software can be used to discreetly trigger an alarm which automatically notifies everyone in the immediate vicinity. The emergency’s position and any supplied details are automatically updated and visible to all involved users. Informed users can indicate that they are on the way to the emergency’s location in order to reassure the reporter himself and motivate others to get involved. The goal of enCourage is to quickly raise awareness for local emergencies and promote moral courage.

Symbiosis (Nicklas Kulp, Prinz Jannik, Lasse Wulf und Eric Klappert) won the games category and is a graphical real time game with a new concept, in which two players may win together, may lose together, or – at the right point in time – may betray the other player in order to win as the only one. Two players play two asymmetric designed roles (crew and ship-AI) on a damaged space ship, which drifts towards a black hole. At first the players need to cooperate to survive. In the course of the game, however, they become less reliant on each other. When the ship is repaired, the players may win together, or each player may try to kill the other one to win on their own. But by doing so, they risk dieing together due to time- and resource loss.

One of the teams Dogma, enCourage and Symbiosis will advance to the Microsoft Imagine Cup Worldwide Finals from July, 26 to August, 01 in Seattle, Washington. The winner of the Worldwide Finals will get 50.000 $.