Athena's Palace

Thanks to AthenaHacks and all the wonderful sponsors. Special Shoutout to Zynga for the Unity workshop and Microsoft for the Hololens!
Our Unity Project
Source code that helped us achieve our dreams
What some of the objects look like in Unity!

Inspiration

We saw a Sherlock episode talking about the Mind Palace and upon further research, discovered that is is a well-known memorization tool! As students, we all have problems when it comes to memorization. Therefore, we wanted to create a mixed-reality simulation of a mind palace that can potentially help anyone to memorize anything in the future! :)

What it does

It is a mixed-reality simulation that allows the user to walk through a familiar space and associate things that need to be memorized with items placed in certain locations. For example, our demo aims to help the user memorize Shakespeare's Sonnet 18. We associated each line of the poem with an unique object (the more ridiculous, the more effective), almost like a mnemonic device. The user can walk through the space for however many times it takes to memorize the task at hand. By being able to see the object with the help of the Microsoft Hololens, it will help people struggling with traditional methods of the mind palace technique. Since the user is looking at a familiar background, interacting with the environment and associating each line with the particular object placed in a known location, it will help the user retain information more efficiently.

How we built it

We used source code developed for Pokemon Go, which allows certain objects to be placed in locations in the mixed-reality environment. We then used Unity to add on 3D objects unique to our purpose to demonstrate the mind palace tool.

Challenges we ran into

We had never been exposed to Unity, C#, Microsoft-Hololens technology, or even been to a Hackathon. Therefore, we had a very steep learning curve. We had very ambitious goals in the beginning including user input and we had to scale it down to something within our capabilities.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We have a finished demo! We are also very happy to submit our project despite our lack of experience going into this Hackathon.

What we learned

We learned to work under pressure. We also learned many valuable skills such as Microsoft-Hololens, Unity and so on that we will definitely use again in the future. We also learned what a Hackathon is like and now we will be less intimidated to go to our next one!

What's next for Athena's Palace

We want to implement user input where the user can customize the object that will be placed in their own environment. This would help not only to fit the objects better in the space, but also retain learning because the objects will have direct meaning to the user. We also would like to implement the cognitive service AI to allow voice commands that can directly input images and models in the environment.