Still working on the perfect look for formals? Computer science students Daniel Chyan ’14, Angela Dai ’13, Tiantian Zha ’13 and Amy Zhou ’13 might be able to offer some advice.
They took first place at the Facebook Camp Hackathon last weekend, beating teams that qualified at earlier competitions throughout the country. Their creation? Color Me Bold, a program that analyzes a photo and offers jewelry and accessory suggestions. Whether you want to give your outfit an extra splash of color or just want to see what it takes to win a hackathon, you can test it here.
Some tips from Zha:
- After uploading a photo from Facebook, click and drag your mouse over areas of the photo where the outfit you want to match is. If coloring inside the lines isn’t your strong suit, you can right click to erase.
- Next choose whether you want jewelry or accessory recommendations – jewelry works best at the moment.
- Princeton’s network isn’t the speediest, so give it some time.
If you’re skeptical about taking fashion advice from a computer algorithm, well, Facebook’s seal of approval is pretty convincing. It’s even more impressive considering they had just 24 hours to put it together.
Princeton’s team was also the only one with more women than men, which might account for the fashion-forward hack. Zha said she got the idea when thinking about day-to-day problems she’d like to solve – “accessorizing can definitely take up as much time as I have available. The girls were totally onboard–and outvoted our one male team member.”
Check out an interview with the Princeton team and video from the hackathon here – considerably tamer than the Hollywood version, but the Ripsticks do look pretty cool.