CtrlCore came out of a brainstorming session around the LeapMotion - an Xbox Kinect-like camera that focused on tracking hand movements. We quickly realized that we could utilize the camera along with a projector to act as a touchscreen - but the surface could be anything that we could project on. From there, we came up with different use cases for this "projectable touchscreen" and we realized that as smarthome technology becomes more widespread, controlling all of these devices would reqire even more screens across someone's home. Wouldn't it be so much better if, instead of 4 or 5 screens to access the smart home system scattered across your home, you could have a projectable touchscreen to be placed wherever is convenient for you at any time? That was the original goal behind CtrlCore.
This was the first hackathon for 75% of our team, and naturally we faced challenges in planning and time-management, but we were all very proud of what we accomplished by the conclusion of TartanHacks17 - a fully functional "projectable touchscreen" utilizing a mini-projector and LeapMotion camera, and a functioning potential interface for accessing smart home components, with a fully-functional demo of the smart lighting component.