Rodney Tan, Nicholas Foong and Brandon Lum, senior students from the Diploma in Cyber & Digital Security, emerged Champions at the Open Jive Regional Challenge. It was a hotly contested competition between five teams from Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand and Singapore at the Raffles City Convention Centre on 28 July 2009. The trio from Temasek Polytechnic School of Informatics & IT won the challenge with their application ‘SmartShop’.

It was the frustration of not being able to handle and try products while shopping online that inspired the team to create an application for online shopping. Under the supervision of their lecturers, Mr Lim Eyung and Ms Lock Hun Ya, the students developed an application that enhances the user’s online shopping experience.

The purpose of Smart Shop is to enable online shoppers to "view" the product from different angles/distance as though they have the product physically in front of them. They can "try out" items such as clothing on themselves using a normal webcam and computer. This is achieved by using Augmented Reality (AR) technology to increase the “realism” of the shopping experience.

The students also won two other awards at the competition – the Sun Developer’s Choice Award [given to the team with the most votes from developers at the event] and the Elixir Market Potential Award [given to the team with the most ability to provide a practical solution that is commercially viable, applicable to a real life problem and relevant to widespread target users.

About Open Jive: In Open Jive, students have to use open source technologies to build web 2.0 solutions that respond to businesses’ needs to lower costs and increase business efficiencies. Organized by Sun Microsystems and supported by the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) and the Institute of Technical Education (ITE), the challenge is part of IDA’s 2009 series of the National Infocomm Competition (NIC).