For the second year in a row I participated in Hack@Brown, Brown’s annual hackathon, and won! You can read more about my team’s hack at http://devpost.com/software/rox-star.

For our “hack” we created a 21st century karaoke experience called Rox Star! Users sing along to songs of their choice in a virtual reality populated with scores of adoring, cheering fans and your very own monolithic stadium stage with flashing lights and fog.

In addition, vocal effects such as autotune, reverb, delay, and automatic harmonization are used to “sweeten” your voice, another departure from traditional karaoke.

This year’s hackathon was a great event, drawing hundreds of awesome hackathon participants from many different fields of study (i.e. not only computer science) and different places in the world (one person came all the way from Rotterdam)!

Like last year, I was very surprised to learn my team were finalists! Caught off guard and incredibly sleep deprived, we scrambled to present our “hack” to hundreds of students, professors, and people from the tech industry (including Peter Norvig from Google)!

As Shakespeare said, “All’s well that ends well”; and somehow the judges appreciated our last-minute presentation enough for us to win (maybe our questionable rendition of Journey’s classic song, “Don’t Stop Believin'” helped) . And what a wonderful way to finish my last Hack@Brown!

If you’re unfamiliar about what a hackathon entails you can read about my first hackathon experience last year at http://www.carl-olsson.com/holoscreen-hackbrown/.