On May 5, 2018, twelve student teams from across the nation convened at the Microsoft Reactor in San Francisco, CA to compete for the gold in the annual US Imagine Cup Finals. The event started with a keynote address from Microsoft Corporate Vice President Derek Burney, followed by project pitches from the twelve teams representing top schools like Johns Hopkins, UC Davis, UCLA, Georgia Institute of Technology and Harvard University.

Pengram, the UC Berkeley team made of student from the Berkeley Master of Engineering (MEng) program, Berkeley VR Club, and Center for Augmented Cognition, won first place. Pengram is an AR/VR platform which allows engineers from around the world to be holographically ‘teleported’ into a workspace when needed. For example, if an operator that is repairing a $100,000 medical device needs help, they will be able to wire into our service, and using a Hololens, they will be able to watch an expert on that device perform the repairs in 3D. The Pengram team utilized research from the Berkeley MEng capstone team, OpenARK. The OpenARK team, Tongyu Chen, Weijia Huang, Rachel Lee, Kuan Lu, proposed an open-sourced module included in the Open Augmented Reality Kit (OpenARK) software project. This 3D scanning module will work with any off-the-shelf depth sensor, allowing users to scan both the entire scene as well as specific objects, to output the corresponding 3D models. The open-sourced nature also allows any developer to improve the existing codebase and contribute to the community. The MEng Electrical Engineering and Computer Science team was advised by Allen Y. Yang, Ph.D., Executive Director at FHL Vive Center for Enhanced Reality and Chief Scientist atthe Coleman Fung Institute for Engineering Leadership. The six winning teams from the US Imagine Cup Finals advance to the 16th annual Imagine Cup World Finals for a chance to win a $100,000 cash prize.

Congratulations Penmark team on placing first! Wishing you luck in the World Cup. 👏

What’s is the Imagine Cup?

For the past 16 years, the Imagine Cup has been the world’s premier student technology competition. Since 2003, Microsoft has provided a global platform for students to turn their dreams into reality. Students from across the globe build amazing teams to bring their biggest, boldest ideas to life. Working with mentors and industry leaders, they get feedback to further hone and develop their project. Read more about the Imagine Cup here: https://imagine.microsoft.com/en-us/Category/11

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Pengram/OpenARK win first place at Microsoft Imagine Cup US Finals was originally published in Berkeley Master of Engineering on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.