Black Lives Matter

Amid the racism crisis, I created a filter that displays "Black Lives Matter" on users' face. Using this filter, people from their home can virtually participate in protests against racism.

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Inspiration

Seeing the current state of the world in 2020, it was so saddening to see a major racism crisis arrive in the USA due to the death of George Floyd. Seeing the riots and the protests, I was very moved and wanted to show my support for the Black Lives Matter cause. Thus, the will to support the cause and stand against this inhuman act acted as an inspiration for me to create a filter that educates people about the cause and lets everyone participate in the cause without even leaving their homes in this pandemic.

What it does

This is a face filter that displays text like Black Lives Matter, Power to People, and more on the faces of people. The filter works on up to four people and shows different supportive text for different people. I also added colour-changing hearts which work as a symbol of love and support for the cause and the affected people. There is a ColourLUT filter which boosts the colour of the scene along with a dust filter which makes the scene a pretty sight to behold. The overall idea of this filter is to support the cause along with making the process creative and colourful.

How I built it

I built this filter primarily using SparkAR. The SparkAR platform is very friendly and feature-rich for my needs. I also used Photoshop and Illustrator for my textures and assets for the filter. I would thank various YouTubers who helped me in making this filter as their tutorials were great and also the Facebook Developer Community for their support and guidance.

Challenges I ran into

Well, there were quite a few challenges I ran into. Being a beginner who was still exploring SparkAR, the idea of making this filter was already puzzling me. The biggest challenge for me was to animate the text and also set the appropriate size as the text was disappearing a lot of times even if I backed off a little. When I got my assets ready, It was confusing for me to assemble everything together. A lot of the times the Patch Editor threw an error and I spent hours finding the culprit. Nonetheless, I enjoyed these challenges and didn't gave up. I wanted to make this filter and there was nothing that could stop me.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I am really proud that I was able to make such a good filter all by myself! All the hard work and planning I spent was worth it in the end. That sense of accomplishment when I overcame the challenges that stopped me was amazing!

What I learned

I learned a lot of things in this hackathon, specifically:-

  1. How to manage your time in the hackathon
  2. How to come up with ideas that suited your capabilities and to work on those ideas
  3. I learned a lot about SparkAR and its capabilities
  4. My creative skills improved thanks to this hackathon
  5. I learned how to ask for help and search for solutions ## What's next for Black Lives Matter As of right now, I don't have future ideas for this filter, but this serves as a base for creating more filters based on social causes. I would love to cater to the betterment of the world through the medium of AR and give my best shot at the future filters I make.

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