And the winner is: 42 Heilbronn!

In mid-May, Anna, Dennis, Marius and Raimund start building a Magic Mirror as part of the Coding Da Vinci hackathon. One and a half months later, the prototype is finished - and the four 42ers win the Most Technical Award!

The Magic Mirror could be straight out of a Harry Potter movie. When you look at yourself in the mirror, you can see your own face, but not your own clothes. In the competition entry, the T-shirts projected onto the mirror image were derived from pictures of the Stuttgart State Gallery - based on a style transfer using AI. A dream project for Anna. In 2021, she completed her basic studies at the Freie Kunstschule Stuttgart, after which she pursued her passion for numbers and logic and started at 42 Heilbronn. Anna: “Being able to combine art and programming is a dream come true for me. When I heard about the hackathon, I knew straight away that I wanted to take part.” What's more, she has been passionate about Magic Mirrors for a long time. This passion sustains her. What she doesn't know at the beginning is that the hackathon is a real marathon. The situation comes to a head in the last few weeks. Unexpected problems arise with the hardware and interface. A video has to be edited, the presentation has to be designed. The prototype has to be ready by the deadline and will be exhibited at the Württemberg State Museum during the award ceremony. Anna: “It was really tough. Sometimes we worked from 9.00 in the morning until 2.00 at night.” All the better for the success.

The next goal: the Magic Mirror is to be exhibited at the opening of the AI Salon in the Maschinenfabrik on October 21. To this end, the four are optimizing their prototype: Instead of a normal webcam, a 3D camera is to be used that can capture the human body in space and achieve significantly better results - however, the existing code has to be reworked from the ground up for this. Anna: “The 3D camera is being paid for by 42 Heilbronn, and the school has also provided the rest of the material. That's great support.” And then she says that she would never have managed this project without 42: “At the beginning, we really had no idea whether it could work. But here you simply learn how to tackle problems and find solutions.”