On the weekend of the 18th and 19th November, Cambridge will be hosting >sudo : immerse, a free weekend-long team hackathon using leading mixed reality (MR) and virtual reality (VR) tech. The weekend is the latest in a series of Challenge Weekend led by Allia’s Serious Impact programme, which supports impact innovation.
Mixed reality is an exciting emerging technology which overlays a virtual world onto the real one. Made popular by games such as Pokémon Go, mixed reality offers countless opportunities to make real impact to people’s lives. From learning to perform CPR properly to identifying the right medications to fill a prescription in a pharmacy, mixed reality will make real impact on how we interact with technology in the future.
>sudo : immerse is an opportunity to try out this technology first hand, and come up with solutions which can make a positive impact for people, planet or place! Participants will be grouped into multi-disciplinary teams upon arrival and given the chance to use a range of mixed reality equipment with the aim of solving a challenge, revealed at the beginning of the weekend. Teams will be supported by experts in the field to help steer ideas and solidify business cases, and on the Sunday, hacks will be put to the test.
Each solution, be it a live demo, prototype or well-argued business case will be presented in front of a panel of expert judges on the Sunday afternoon for the chance to be crowned >sudo : immerse challenge winner!
Held at Real VNC's Cambridge office, the event is to be supported by world leading tech with big prizes to be won.
The previous Serious Impact Challenge was a hackathon in June, which challenged teams to hack the Internet of Things. A £500 prize went to the winners, who built an IoT solution to identify on street parking using crowdsourced data, easing congestion in cities such as Cambridge.
Allia’s Serious Impact supports aspiring entrepreneurs in Cambridge and Peterborough. It provides structured programmes for all stages of start-up venture, from ideation workshops through to a 9 month incubator.
These sudo challenge weekends aren’t just a chance to form new peer groups among tech leaders in sectors such as smart-cities, agri-tech, clean-tech, and health, you’ll also become immersed in identifying impact solutions to a pressing social or environmental challenge that could find an immediate route to market.
The weekend challenges are designed to stimulate discussion around key impact challenges, facilitating creative thinking, collaboration and innovation says Paul Hughes, director of Enterprise Support at Allia, But if you have a great idea, or even if you are already running your venture, and need some structured support to help grow and create a bigger impact, get in touch today and see how we could help.
It’s not too late to sign up to the event – find out more and sign up now!
You can follow @SeriousImpactUK on Twitter and tweet about this event using #sudoimmerse.
