Aura | Devpost

Inspiration

Inspired by the UCSD heat map dataset, we understood that real time data like the weather and humidity variations has the potential to be overlapped with information about sun positioning and natural light to help and aid a wide consumer market of novice photographers and those simply looking into the discipline without want to spend egregious financial resources to be able to obtain "good" photo. This lack of fundamentals and the elements in the dataset combined to give us the idea a photography trainer, called Aura.

What it does

Aura is a mobile based application designed to help those who hope to better their photo taking abilities to sharpen their skills through comprehensive lesson plans – gamified to make the user earn points ('trees') to be able to compete on a leaderboard –, community based activities and a live AR viewfinder which analyses your surrounds in real time to tell you how to better position your camera for the optimum image, using key photography theory. We want to make our users be able to capture their reality, not have to create or curate it.

How we built it

Built prototype and front-end UI/UX using Figma, with basic animations using Figma React, iconography, logos and brand identity established using Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.

Challenges we ran into

Designing the AR viewfinder was our biggest conceptual challenge, translating abstract photography theory (rule of thirds, leading lines, exposure balance) into real-time, digestible on-screen guidance required careful thinking about how to surface feedback without cluttering the viewfinder. On the design side, building a visual language that felt cohesive and clean yet accessible without financial investment – especially across the lesson, community, and AR screens– was harder than expected within the timeframe.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of how cohesive the product feels end-to-end. From the onboarding flow through to the forest and leaderboard, Aura has a consistent identity that communicates calm, growth, and creativity. We're also proud of the tree/forest metaphor as a progress system; it ties environmental mindfulness to personal growth. Also super random but we learnt how to horizontal scroll on Figma.

What we learned

When we got lost in ideas and too many features that could be implemented, coming back to a central ethos that we had, fortunately, established early on helped us cut out the unnecessary. We also deepened our skills in Figma's component and variable systems, and learned a lot about how to represent motion and AR interactions in a static prototype convincingly enough to communicate the full vision.

What's next for Aura

Established the platform onto iOS is the immediate next step, which means building out the AR viewfinder using ARKit and integrating a computer vision model trained to evaluate composition in real time. Beyond that, we want to expand the lesson library with community-contributed content, introduce collaborative challenges where users shoot the same prompt and vote on each other's results, and explore partnerships with photography brands to offer actual real life rewards alongside the in-app tree reward system.