Cloudinary’s Hackathon Results Are In! The Purge, Kernel Panic, and Hauntedfolio

Written By Colby Fayock Oct-30-2024 5 Min Read

The Spooky AI Hackathon has wrapped up with absolutely frightening results!

A staggering 140 projects were submitted by Miguel Ángel Durán’s vast community, keeping us busy and in sheer terror as we hand-reviewed each one.

The goal of this hackathon was to create anything that combined the theme of Spooky AI with Cloudinary tech. As you could imagine, developers pulled out all sorts of Cloudinary features like generative AI, dynamic overlays, and video generation to create something absolutely menacing.

What was at stake?

1st place: $500 and a free Cloudinary Plus account for 1 year

2nd place: $250 and a free Cloudinary Plus account for 1 year
3rd place: $100 and a free Cloudinary Plus account for 1 year

And to sweeten the deal, the top 10 would all get an amazing swag pack, which includes a t-shirt, stickers, and the much-coveted Cloudinary unicorn.

Because we were so impressed, we added five notable mentions to the swag pool.

But enough about the prizes, let’s dig into the projects.

The Finalists

The top 10 consists of 10 total projects with five claiming ranked placings.

So in no particular order, here are projects six through 10:

From Gerardo:

This project is about horror movies. You can upload your picture and, with Cloudinary, get a mask and random background depending on the movie you choose.

Spooky Customize AI utilizes Cloudinary AI Background Removal while changing the background with a mix of an underlay and generative background replacement. It’s built on Vite React using the React SDK and dynamic overlays to produce mask effects, cropping, and resizing to ultimately produce the experience.

Link: https://spooky-customize-ai.vercel.app/

Code: https://github.com/gerardocrr/spooky-customize-ai

4th Place: Ghost Spotters

Built by Yesid Rosas Toro

From Yesid (Translated):

Who you gonna call? Find and catch all the ghosts before time runs out.

Original (En Español):

¿A quien vas a llamar? Encuentra y atrapa a todos los fantasmas antes de que se acabe el tiempo.

Ghost Spotters cleverly uses overlays with positioning based on AI face detection to hide some faces with masks throughout the scene of a crowd. The app uses the Next.js SDK to apply generative AI transformations and artistic filters that are used to make everything a little bit more spooky.

Link: https://ghost-spotters.vercel.app/

Code: https://github.com/devRobots/ghost-spotters

3rd Place: Hauntedfolio

Built by Xavi Alfaro

From Xavi:

Hauntedfolio generates a fun, creepy portfolio to showcase your top repositories, languages, and bio, enhanced with spooky visuals and mysterious facts. The app also creates a haunted-style video that highlights your projects, skills and top languages.

Hauntedfolio uses generative AI to replace both the background and the face with a zombie version. It was built with Astro relying on the Astro SDK to power transformations. It uses other Cloudinary transformations to change colors of objects, generate social media cards, and video generation for a dynamically generated video.

Link: https://hauntedfolio.vercel.app/

Code: https://github.com/xavimondev/hauntedfolio

2nd Place: Kernel Panic

Built by James Perez

From James (Translated):

An image is nothing but a mathematical representation of reality. An image can be altered to our liking. But by altering the images that represent reality, are we altering reality itself? You are not the only ‘you’ out there. Look at the real ‘you’ inside you. With the help of artificial intelligence, you can scan your insides and find what lies there. It is probably an entity beyond human comprehension…

Original (En Español):

Una imagen no es más que una representación matemática de la realidad. Una imagen se puede alterar a nuestro gusto. Pero ¿al alterar las imágenes que representan la realidad, estaríamos alterando a la misma realidad? Tú no eres el único ‘tú’ allá afuera. Mira el verdadero ‘tú’ de tu interior. Con la ayuda de la inteligencia artificial puedes escanear tu interior y encontrar lo que allí yace. Probablemente sea una entidad más allá de la compresión humana…

Kernel Panic is an Astro app that uses Generative AI via the Astro SDK to take an uploaded image and make it a bit more frightful using Generative Replace and Generative Background Replace. The effects were managed using Named Transformations, making it easy to maintain a single source of transformations for a variety of assets.

Link: https://eramajarvi-project-spellbound.vercel.app/

Code: https://github.com/eramajarvi/project-spellbound

1st Place: La Purga de Halloween

Built by Pablo Cazorla

From Pablo (Translated):

Using the app, you can sign up to be ‘purged’ from the world on Halloween night. To do so, we show you your current face, and how you’ll look after the Purge.

Original (En Español):

Mediante la aplicación, puedes anotarte para ser ‘purgado’ del mundo la noche de Halloween. Para ello, te mostramos tu rostro actual, y cómo quedarás despues de la Purga.

Beyond uploading, La Purga uses generative AI to change the user’s image to look like a zombie to give the effect of a casualty of The Purge. It’s build on Astro and like the other’s uses the Astro SDK to make it easy to create such a compelling experience.

Link: https://lapurga.vercel.app/

Code: https://github.com/pablocazorla/lapurga