How Three Friends Built an Award-Winning VR Hackathon Team
One person can have a great idea. But a great team — that’s what makes a great idea grow. At every Major League Hacking hackathon, we see awe-inspiring teamwork, old friends and complete strangers mind-melding over a weekend of inspiration (and snacks!).
But what makes a great team? To explore the roots of hackathon collaboration success, we talked with three award-winning University of California San Diego Computer Science students: Kristin Agcaoili, Anish Kannan, and Connor Smith.
When they began attending MLH hackathons in 2014, none had much prior coding or tech experience. But they bonded over the excitement of making things and learning new skills. When Smith proposed they join forces and devote their hackathon efforts to virtual reality, a powerful team was born.
Fast forward to 2017, and the three friends have won numerous awards for their VR work, pioneered immersive education and empathy experiences, and helped grow the UCSD VR Club to over 300 members — influencing UCSD to assemble the largest VR classroom in the country.
Today, Kannan and Smith are teaching an online edX course they created on VR development in Unity, and Agcaoili recently wrapped up an internship at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where she was using data from the Curiosity Rover to help scientists explore Mars in VR.
Not bad for a crew that began by missing a bus!
Bring a Sleeping Bag and a Cool Idea
Anish Kannan was the first of the three to begin attending hackathons, participating in 2014’s MLH Member Event CalHacks after some hackathon vet high school friends convinced him. Bring a sleeping bag, they said, and “just have a cool idea, just be willing to make something.”
However, Kannan almost didn’t even make it … in the door. He missed the bus and had to hitch a ride with strangers. Those strangers ended up becoming his first hackathon team, and Kannan was hooked. “It was just really cool, all these people excited to make a cool project,” he says. “That was just a really magical kind of atmosphere.”
He enthused about this magical atmosphere to Smith and Agcaoili, two friends he’d met at a UCSD incoming student summer program, and he convinced them to go to HackSC.
Pushing Yourself Without Fear
Kristin Agcaoili’s motivation came from a passion for writing stories. At HackSC, she dove into a marathon workshop for Unity — a game development platform — and came out of with a full-fledged narrative 3D game.
But what really stood out for her, like Kannan, was the electrifying atmosphere. Ideas were bouncing around and recombining in unexpected ways, and Agcaoili felt empowered by a space where she could make something with friends without worrying about whether it was perfect. “It’s surprising how far you can push yourself in a hackathon environment,” she says.
HackSC 2014 is also where Smith would have the opportunity to push himself — thanks to the MLH Hardware Lab and its sponsors — by trying exclusive cutting-edge VR tech for the first time.
Inspiration at the MLH Hardware Lab
Though Smith went into HackSC with “no prior programming experience,” he did know he wanted to do something with VR. “Like an Avatar: Last Airbender kind of, like, you can shoot flames from your hand sort of thing,” he recalls.
What he got his hands on was an Oculus Rift — the popular VR headset — and a Myo armband, a wearable that collects electrical muscle activity, allowing you to send input information with anything from a squeeze to a punch.
Both technologies were part of the MLH Hardware Lab, a key component of MLH hackathons. Students can borrow Hardware Lab devices — VR headsets, laptops, circuit boards and electronics — for free use in their projects. In turn, the MLH sponsors who provide this hardware get an eager and innovative audience to show off the potential of their technology.
To Smith, this was all even better than flames: “I was so absolutely blown away by the technology that I didn’t sleep a single minute.” In the grand hackathon tradition, his excitement fueled his learning. “I had no experience using the Unity game engine, no experience using the Oculus Rift, no experience using the Myo armband,” Smith says. “But I learned all three of those, and by the end of the hackathon, my team and I had created an actual game.”
Smith returned to USCD with a mission. He convinced Agcaoili and Kannan to team up with him and build VR experiences. The hackathon circuit was calling them, and they went for it.
The Beauty of Clicking as a Team
Agcaoili, Kannan, and Smith’s ambition quickly zeroed in on meaningful VR experiences, exercising VR’s ability to facilitate kinesthetic learning and promote empathy.
Their first big hit came at HackingEDU in October 2015, when they won third place for Cell VR, an immersive educational experience that takes the user inside a human cell. Wearing an Oculus Rift, the user can gawk at the different molecules floating and combining in a cell — just like ideas at a hackathon! Using Sixense Razer Hydras — magnetic field-driven controllers that detect motion and orientation — you can, as Smith says, “create biochemical reactions by smashing cell molecules together.”
In addition to showcasing the team’s passion for innovative education that emphasizes interaction in subjects normally confined to the slog of abstraction and memorization (when’s the last time you learned a molecular formula by smashing molecules?), Cell VR also showcased the symmetry of the team itself.
Kannan came up with the original design, did the biology research, and implemented the Razer Hydra interaction. Smith wrote the C# scripts that controlled the cells, and Agcaoili built the Maya models and interfaces that gave the user something to see. “We just clicked, we just worked together beautifully,” Kannan says. Smith concurs: “We learned a lot, about ourselves, our friendships, like how much I could trust these guys, in, like, our darkest situations. As cheesy as it sounds.”
This spirit of trust enabled a carefully partitioned collaboration, and the final product proved the strength of the approach.
Not In It For the Prizes
Soon the three friends were winning hackathon prizes left and right, for projects that explored subjects from ocean pollution to lucid dreaming, orchestra conducting to chemistry labs. But they’re adamant that they weren’t in it for the prizes. “We always just went to make something new, or try something new, or work as a team,” Smith says.
In fact, one of the wins they’re most proud of expanded the team even bigger. For Another Day, which they built at MLH Member Event Hack Arizona in 2016, they wanted to tackle the subject of depression and see if they could build an empathy simulator that would “help people without depression understand what it was like to live in the shoes of someone with depression,” as Smith puts it.
But they knew depression is a complex and powerful experience, and they didn’t want to misrepresent it. So they anonymously interviewed over 30 people through social media and incorporated their stories into Another Day. In the end, they won Most Collaborative team for their efforts to reach out and represent a larger community of people suffering from depression.
Paving a Journey With MLH
As they get ready to graduate from UCSD and begin careers, Agcaoili, Kannan, and Smith know they’re leaving their hackathon days behind — for now. Of course, they went out with a bang, winning Most Creative and Education Grand Prize at Stanford University’s 2017 MLH Member Event TreeHacks for Sensory, a project to help spread awareness of different sensory disorders.
Looking back, they feel they owe much of their journey’s foundations to MLH. “None of this would’ve happened if not for MLH,” Smith says. “It’s just kind of crazy to think that this all started from one hackathon, because I was lucky enough to get my hands on an Oculus Rift from MLH.”
Beyond the opportunity, the group also cited MLH’s assistance as invaluable. “The advice and the assistance they provide makes all the difference,” Smith says. “There is a significant quality improvement when you go to an MLH hackathon.”
And Don’t Forget the Sleeping Bag
To new students going to their first MLH hackathon, Agcaoili, Kannan, and Smith stress the importance of taking risks and meeting new people. “Don’t worry about the competition, just worry about making something for yourself that’s … going to be meaningful for you, and you can do it with people that you enjoy spending time with,” Smith says. “And maybe that’s going to build you bonds that are going to last for the rest of your life.”
Agcaoili says that hackathons provided a self-affirmation and confidence school never could. “At a hackathon, what’s cool is that you can be happy with what you made, and see your own accomplishments.”
At MLH hackathons, participants get to take those risks and see those accomplishments in vibrant teams, using state-of-the-art technology from the MLH Hardware Lab to drive never-before-seen ideas. In 200 events around the world, MLH’s 65,000 students are bonding, discovering new technology, and realizing their passions.
For Agcaoili, Kannan, and Smith, an Oculus Rift and a Myo armband sparked their imagination and shifted their lives. Back in 2014, they hadn’t even tried VR. Now they are passionate that VR is the future of kinesthetic learning and empathy simulation — and they’re proving it to the world.
