How a talent show mindset helps us find the next big thing.

New technology is popping up faster than anyone can manage to keep track of. And there’s only one way of figuring out if it`s a viable tech - you have to try it out.

And this is why the Emerging IT Lab (EIT) has seen the light of day. Petter Hermansen is part of the team and explains their philosophy.

These ideas are all well and good but not much use if they’re not realized are they? Thankfully, Hermansen and the rest of the EIT team aren’t wasting any time, so in April they put together their first activity - the Augmented Reality Hackathon in Trondheim.

“Both Google and Apple have released AR-kits lately and our aim was to see if it was stage-ready for us. Additionally, we wanted to see if we could use our own data and visualize it in a useful way. Basically the goal was to understand the technology more,” Hermansen explains.

“Both teams are at the top of their field and it’s really exciting to see what they’ll be able to come up with during these two days,” Petter Hermansen says.

He’s talking about the AR team from Trondheim, who have done great work with the HoloLens tech, and the Mobility team from Stavanger - famous for making mobile app magic come to life. Getting a bunch of great minds together to play around is quite a good idea, Hermansen says.

“It’s normally quite exciting to see what the teams come up with after such a short period of time and intense work,” Hermansen adds.

So it was natural that Kjell Inge Skjønberg greeted the hackathon attendees with a cheerful message:

“The most important thing is that these days are for trying and failing - and having fun! But we also want you to struggle a bit with the technology and hopefully learn a thing or two,” he said.

Beate Louise Stølen Olsen from the geology department gave them their task and a briefing on the different core samples, what they contained and how they analyzed them. Then, it was up to the guys to figure out what they could actually do using this AR technology. And they came up with quite a few surprises after two intense days.

During the last day geologist Beate was joined by Olivier Lopez, and they were presented with the different demos and projects the teams had created. They only had two days to do it but ended up with impressing the geologists. Among the demos presented was one that had renderings of core samples, which allowed them to look at the depth of the core, gamma ray density and more. This was one of the demos that caught the interest of the geologists.

“When we’re looking at the core samples in this way we’re always looking at one data set or the other. But we’re never looking at both combined, like you’ve done here. This is very useful stuff,” Olivier Lopez said.

Time keeps on turning and it’s time to take a walkabout and try to figure out some answers. Beate Louise actually didn’t have very high expectations beforehand.

“Seeing as they were IT people who had very little experience working with subsurface data and they only had two days, I have to admit my expectations were pretty low. But I’m very impressed by the apps they developed,” Olsen says.

Petrophysicist Olivier Lopez, who helped in providing data for the developers to play around with, was also impressed by the results.

Kjell Inge Skjønberg is also happy with how everything turned out. His goal was to let the teams play around with the tech and to get a feel for it, which he feels they achieved.

“I think as developers it’s important to “break free” from our daily tasks and do something different. With events like these we can take whatever shortcuts we want in order to run conceptual tests and not be tied up by rules,” Skjønberg says.

But a lawless experience and fun is not all they got out from it. All the networking, collaboration and general playing around actually resulted in the creation of something new.