[Notice] Effective October 1, 2023, LINE Fukuoka has changed its company name to LY Communications. Articles published on or before September 30, 2023 were written with our former company name.
LINE Fukuoka’s development team holds a Hackathon event once a year. At the second Hackathon that recently came to a close, engineers were given two days each to develop and present; they achieved the feat of transforming 16 ideas into prototypes.
This post features an introduction to the “Sharing Smile Drone” (one of the 16 products or services developed at the Hackathon that utilizes drone technology) as well as a general report about the event.
For a detailed report with technical analysis, please visit the following Web page: https://engineering.linecorp.com/en/blog/detail/250
*Hackathon: Similar to marathons, a Hackathon is a development event where engineers focus on developing products within a given timeframe.
“Sharing Smile Drone” is utilized to take pictures (something that many people do daily). The drone will hover in the air and shoot photos when prompted by the voice command “Take a photo.” On top of that, it is designed to fit everyone being photographed in the frame, and the shutter only clicks once a smile is recognized on each person’s face. Once the picture has been taken, the drone lands with the command “Landing.” Using Sharing Smile Drone lets people take group photos whenever they like without having to search for a photographer, leaving them with a picture where everyone is smiling.
Check out the demonstration video of Sharing Smile Drone in action here.
Several products and services that were conceived in the previous Hackathon have been adopted for in-house use. We may see Sharing Smile Drone being used for the company group photo in the future!
≪Presentation Materials≫
To engineers, the in-house Hackathon is a venue where they can try out technologies they are interested in but don’t use in their everyday work. A number of cutting-edge technologies that are hot topics right now were presented at the event: drones, AR, VR, Blockchain, Big Data analysis, and image recognition. The Hackathon highlighted the engineers’ motivation to absorb new technologies quickly, as well as their pure love of anything tech-related.
The development team has seen a substantial rise in the number of new engineers in the past year. Their nationalities are also diversifying, with about 50% of engineers now hailing from overseas.
The recently concluded Hackathon event was held outside of the office, giving engineers the chance socialize outside of the professional bonds they had established at work.
LINE Fukuoka’s development team is currently hiring various engineers. If you are interested, please take a look at the “Careers” page below:
Regardless of location, LINE engineers also regularly host Tech Meetups that center on technology presentations, so if you are interested, please join us! Announcements for upcoming Meetups will be made on the various official accounts.
【LINE Fukuoka Official Accounts】
Official LINE account (LINE ID: @linefukuoka)
【Related Articles】
We reported on the previous Hackathon in the following blog posts: