Gadgetory

imean sure on microsoft's campus we're the largest private hackathon in the world is happening right behind me as part of Microsoft's of one week that happens every year it was started by Satya Nadella the current CEO as a way to inspire new innovation at Microsoft among the things that come out of it are some interesting products like the Xbox adaptive controller for people with disabilities and dyslexia technology that is in a lot of Microsoft software these days so let's take a look at what's inside we're all here to participate in a hackathon or in the packet Ron tent today and we've decided to focus on the Xbox and how we could expand that platform to go through four therapeutics so what kind of therapeutics Ike explain that to me so there's a lot of different therapeutics that people utilize some for autism maybe some for a sports injury I think a lot of people have had maybe an ankle injury where they've had to use a fan or a wrist injury where they've had to use a ball all of those kind of can be boring and for parents that may have to take the kids back and forth or autism visits they don't actually do a lot of the exercises at home and so when there doing those exercises they're not getting the betterment of themselves in it and so thinking about could we make that Xbox enable those therapies we're working in a little bit of hardware hack to see if there would be maybe a glove that could fit for maybe a ball injuries that could see and connect it up to some wires and connect it to the Xbox with a new adaptive controller because it has the ability to have another plug so that then we can utilize a game for those activities so this is smart tattoos so this is temporary tattoos that enable you to have capacitive touch so you can then troll things in your environment from your skin or other surfaces via Bluetooth so it's next generation wearables with the fabrication processes that are easy enough to for anyone to do and and your goal with this hackathon is just to show all the different ways it can be used yeah essentially I mean we can't think of everything so the goal was to come up with a fabrication process that would facilitate anybody in the company to play with it whether they want to augment their controllers prosthetics before ability or for disability and so we're gonna demo so we've got an instrument on the arm that actually anyone can play their own instruments so and you can also change the instrument so think the next generation bands are musicians or even dancers who want to you know play music yeah and then we also have other instantiations of being able to control things in your environment oh wow so I can just turn on the different ways yeah right so basically via bluetooth we can send signals to anywhere right so this kind of opens up the door and this is why we're here today so that we can get people to kind of play and experiment so that's a look at some of the projects happening under this big tent at this hackathon you want to learn more you can go to see Netcom or you can follow me on twitter at Ian's shirt meanwhile I'm gonna look at some more cool new stuff you