The Cape Town studio of Deloitte Digital won first prize at the recent Global Deloitte Digital Mashup Day.
The tech mash-up event brought together eight teams from the UK, Japan and South Africa to build innovative, useful projects that work, using any technology that the teams wished to utilise. The solutions were formulated, built and presented within a 24-hour timeframe.
The team from the Cape Town studio built a Scalextric (slot-racing) car game controlled by heart rate, called Heartrace. Two people with Bluetooth heart-rate monitors strapped on and had to run on the spot to pump up their heart rates. The faster their hearts beat, the more voltage was supplied to the slot cars on the track, and the faster the cars went. The laps were counted by a custom built light sensor and beamed onto a custom-built iPad interface.
This was the first year that a non-UK team have won outright, with Deloitte Digital SA previously coming third with their Fire Detecting ‘Hazard This’ social response app.
“Competing in this 24-hour mashup allowed us to learn and explore sensor and hardware technologies which we are always eager to get our hands on,” says Greg Hesom, the project leader for Heartrace.
“It was great to see our idea come together so well and we’re already dreaming up bigger ideas for the next one. I was particularly impressed with the collective knowledge of the team which seemed to draw from a mix of prior experience, hobbies and imagination,” says Hesom.
“What this win demonstrates is the extreme competencies in innovation and solution-finding that we have in our Cape Town team, placing us at the very top of a global network of interactive studios. In less than 24 hours, we created something fun and truly innovative. We’re very proud of this achievement and it goes to prove that the heart of Digital pumps in Cape Town,” says Tim Bishop, director at Deloitte Digital.
