Dr. Adrian Cheng’s New World Development Hackathon 2021
Some of Neogoma teammates (Stars & Dust for the weekend) joined the latest Eureka Nova Hackathon, where a few dozen teams gathered to create the future of real-estate and retail in K11 Musea, the Silicon Valley of Culture.
Once again, New World Development Group (NWD) and its iconic K11 Musea brand have pulled together one of the most ambitious hackathons in Hong Kong. During 48h, 25 teams were trying to crack the challenges provided by NWD’s business units. Each team had a few days before the weekend to think about solutions, but those initial ideas had to be adapted after great feedback from mentors. Those mentors provided teams with insights about various business units and specific details about daily business hurdles.
Mixing case studies 1 & 3, Stars & Dust started to map some parts of K11 to test few ideas. Leveraging StardustSDK and its online editor (yeah we know, not very creative with names ^^), each demo took less than an hour to be built. The initial idea was to bring NFTs and anchor them to specific locations in the mall. With NFTs being on fire (for example Beeple sold for $69 million its collage, Everydays: The First 5000 Days), creating a physical showroom for digital art seemed promising. Yet the first tests and user feedback couldn’t demonstrate our unique and unfair advantages, as it seems that ARkit/ARcore were enough to display virtual art in front of users, without the need for accurate relocation.
After few iterations and more feedback from NWD mentors (big thanks to Ben, Jontzen, Karl, Gary, Todd and Lawrence!!), we’ve opted for a more ambitious approach — obviously more risky as well. Instead of passively contemplating digital Art, we thought to involve users in a more collaborative way, which eventually ended up in a fighting mode!
It took our 3D designer less than 2 hours to build the game assets, few hours for our CTO to code the game mechanism and Voila, the very first AR real-time multiplayer experience was live on K11 Musea’s 6th floor!
As with every hackathon, the limited time didn’t allow us to improve further that demo, but imagine what shopping malls could deliver with a few more days… Below is quick footage of the same real-time collaborative experience, shoot on the following Monday in our coworking space.
The future of retail and real-estate is not written on PPTs, it is being currently built by hundreds of startups. We believe spatial computing will provide the missing link between online and offline. Whoever owns this new index, like domain names in the 90’s, sits on a gold mine. Physical and digital are merging further, creating new opportunities for traditional retailers and property owners to build upon their location. If they don’t, they might end up providing free facilities for ecommerce & advertising players. That would be missing a huge revenue stream, but the market only rewards brave and bold players!
