MDD Students win VPRO/Society 5.0 hackathon

For two days multidisciplinary teams worked on briefs brought by VPRO Lab partners to design a more sustainable media and broadcasting environment.

Stefan and Mahdis’s team came up with a web application that visually shows the impact of landscape and climate change throughout the years.

Users of the app can select a territory in The Netherlands or in one of the Dutch ex-colonies. They are presented with a time-lapse video of the selected location made out of paintings, archival photos and videos, satellite images, and Google street-view that show how much the landscape has changed over the years. At the end of the video, they answer questions regarding policies that affect the climate. Based on these answers, the app will generate an AI image of how that location will be impacted by the users' stance in the future. It can depict either a destructive, grey, dystopian future or a solarpunk, green, utopian future.

But Stefan and Mahdis were not the only MDD students taking part.

Oana Dochita and Fatemeh Azh worked on an app that helps people in their grounding process in a new neighbourhood. It uses AI to generate stories from public media archives for users to get to know their environment better and feel more at home soon after they move into a new neighbourhood.

Students Jaap Hulst and Amanda Herrera Miranda’s team brought in a new perspective that provides a voice to nature in a normally human-centric world. So, users can also be exposed to the perspectives of animals regarding the changes to public spaces.

Finally, Naam Hou and Dewi Lagerberg made use of AI to collect stories in one single place. The technology would keep identities anonymous changing the faces and voices and even the backgrounds related to the stories. But what would remain intact are the emotions that the stories convey so that the audience can relate to the storyteller.

The VPRO Lab hackathon was organised in the context of the Society 5.0 Festival.