Coded for glamour and glory, AI make-up arm steals the show in Hong Kong hackathon

Imagine a woman sitting at her vanity as a robotic arm reaches across the table, picks up her lipstick, and applies it to her lips while running through her morning schedule.

Meet Iron Bestie, a personalised make-up assistant that just snatched top honours at what organisers billed as Hong Kong’s first physical artificial intelligence hackathon, beating more than 160 global competitors in an intense 48-hour hardware-meets-software sprint this week.

Powered by vision-language models and voice recognition, the AI arm can identify make-up on a table, select the right product based on a user’s calendar, and apply it directly to their face. To keep personal routines secure, local redaction middleware ensured sensitive user data remained private, the investors said.

The winning team included an unexpected duo: Luo Yuqing, a business information systems graduate from the City University of Hong Kong who said she had no formal coding background, and Zeng Yitao, a senior algorithm developer from the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen.

For Luo, who only started tinkering with AI out of curiosity a year ago, taking home the Grand MVP award in her debut hackathon transformed how she sees robotics, thanks in part to an unexpected glitch on day one.

“When the robotic hand wrapped around my wrist on the first day, it felt like I was holding hands with someone I like,” Luo said.