Nov 13, 2014
The Straits Times
By Lester Hoi
Ideas for a mobile game to help children with lazy eye improve their condition and an app which translates dialects into English or Mandarin were the winners in the inaugural Solve for Tomorrow competition.
A team from the Singapore Management University, Eyenovation, clinched first place in the university category of the competition organised by Samsung. Its idea was a game that is split into two visual parts and played with goggles. The stronger eye sees the static elements of the game, while the lazy eye sees the moving elements.
“To use the example of Tetris, the stronger eye will see the bricks that are fixed at the base, while the lazy eye sees the moving bricks that are falling,” said team member Leonard Li, 23. The idea is to force the lazy eye to “relearn” how to see without depending on the stronger eye.
Six teams – three from the university and three from the polytechnic categories – presented their ideas. The competition is aimed at getting students to use technology to come up with solutions to social issues in Singapore.
Winners get a $10,000 cash prize, a study trip to Samsung’s headquarters in South Korea and an internship opportunity at Samsung Singapore. Ngee Ann Polytechnic’s team, First Words, topped its category for its conceptualisation of a mobile app that translates Chinese dialects into English or Mandarin and vice versa through speech recognition software.
One of the judges, Ms Karen Ngui, head of group strategic marketing and communications of DBS Bank, said: “All six finalists demonstrated how technology can be humanised to better impact how we live each day.”
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