Posted by Bradford Lee – Product Marketing Manager, Augmented Reality, and Ahsan Ashraf – Product Marketing Manager, Google Maps Platform
In September, we launched Google’s Immersive Geospatial Challenge on Devpost where we invited developers and creators from all over the world to create an AR experience with Geospatial Creator or a virtual 3D immersive experience with Photorealistic 3D Tiles.
«We were impressed by the innovation and creativity of the projects submitted. Over 2,700 participants across 100+ countries joined to build something they were truly passionate about and to push the boundaries of what is possible. Congratulations to all the winners!»
We judged all submissions on five key criteria:
Functionality — How are the APIs used in the application?
Purpose — What problem is the application solving?
Content — How creative is the application?
User Experience — How easy is the application to use?
Technical Execution — How well are you showcasing Geospatial Creator and/or Photorealistic 3D Tiles?
Many of the entries are working prototypes, with which our judges thoroughly enjoyed experiencing and interacting. Thank you to everyone who participated in this hackathon.
From our outstanding list of submissions, here are the winners of Google’s Immersive Geospatial Challenge:
Category: Best of Entertainment and Events
Winner, AR Experience: World Ensemble
Description: World Ensemble is an audio-visual app that positions sound objects in 3D, creating an immersive audio-visual experience.
Winner, Virtual 3D Experience: Realistic Event Showcaser
Description: Realistic Event Showcaser is a fully configurable and immersive platform to customize your event experience and showcase its unique location stories and charm.
Winner, Virtual 3D Experience: navigAtoR
Description: navigAtoR is an augmented reality app that is changing the way you navigate through cities by providing a 3 dimensional map of your surroundings.
Category: Best of Commerce
Winner, AR Experience: love ya
Description: love ya showcases three user scenarios for a special time of year that connect local businesses with users.
Category: Best of Travel and Local Discovery
Winner, AR Experience: Sutro Baths AR Tour
Description: This guided tour through the Sutro Baths historical landmark using an illuminated walking path, information panels with text and images, and a 3D rendering of how the Sutro Baths swimming pool complex would appear to those attending.
Winner, Virtual 3D Experience: Hyper Immersive Panorama
Description: Hyper Immersive Panorama uses real time facial detection to allow the user to look left, right, up or down, in the virtual 3D environment.
Winner, Virtual 3D Experience: The World is Flooding!
Description: The World is Flooding! allows you to visualize a 3D, realistic flooding view of your neighborhood.
Category: Best of Productivity and Business
Winner, AR Experience: GeoViz
Description: GeoViz revolutionizes architectural design, allowing users to create, modify, and visualize architectural designs in their intended context. The platform facilitates real-time collaboration, letting multiple users contribute to designs and view them in AR on location.
Category: Best of Sustainability
Winner, AR Experience: Geospatial Solar
Description: Geospatial Solar combines the Google Geospatial API with the Google Solar API for instant analysis of a building’s solar potential by simply tapping it.
Winner, Virtual 3D Experience: EarthLink — Geospatial Social Media
Description: EarthLink is the first geospatial social media platform that uses 3D photorealistic tiles to enable users to create and share immersive experiences with their friends.
Honorable Mentions
In addition, we have five projects that earned honorable mentions:
Simmy
FrameView
City Hopper
GEOMAZE — The Urban Quest
Geospatial Route Check
Congratulations to the winners and thank you to all the participants! Check out all the amazing projects submitted. We can’t wait to see you at the next hackathon.