After some doubts that the theme - "Experiential shopping" - How to redefine the retail industry (online and offline) through experiential shopping - may be a little bit constraining, we were positively surprised by all the ideas from the participating teams. The overall experience was amazing!

We had teams using Artificial Intelligence to improve recommendations or enable users to get the right products from different platforms, like cosmetics based on face shapes and skin tones, we had teams leveraging Augmented Reality to help furniture retailers help their customers simulate the design of the furniture within their homes, and plenty other unique and surprising ideas.

The whole atmosphere was incredible for us and for the participants and we left there with an amazing feeling, after noticing so many bright minds that will innovate in our industry in the not-so-far future.

Our winner was FurniTour, a team that created a mobile application using the Unity engine to offer users the chance to design their spaces using Augmented Reality and allowing them to preview how furniture pieces would look in their homes.

Second prize went to Perfect Match, an Artificial Intelligence and Image Recognition powered platform that allowed customers to accurately identify their skin tone and shape of their face, in order to get the right cosmetic products recommended for their attributes.

Third place went to the Social powered smart shopping platform from SmartBicepz team, who leveraged Image Recognition to identify visually similar outfits and recommend new apparel pieces, based on the social network they create around the platform.

“You know that moment when you're in a candy shop and you want this and that and you can't decide? That's what I felt on Saturday among so many amazing ideas,” Stefan Oncioiu, TIBCO Developer @mindit.io.

“I've had a lot of fun and I've seen a lot of great ideas and implementations. I can't wait to see the next hackathon,” Tiberiu Celeapca, Software Engineer @mindit.io.

HackITall 2022 was an engaging, large-scale hackathon, one of the successful events organized by LSAC, whose audience targets students from technical faculties, passionate about the IT&C field.