BlackBox

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  the black box - what is it?

Inspiration

Finding interesting places around the world to travel, from the comforts of your home. At the same time, creating a simple interactive experience for the user.

What it does

We designed a door with hinges connected to an arduino to project a different image from Google's Street-view API onto the screen every time the door is opened. The kinect is also utilized in facial recognition to determine the angle and depth of the user's profile and it adjusts the projection accordingly.

How I built it

Me and my team built it using node.js to send data to a server, which communicated to a website which refreshed the projected image every time motion was detected on the door.

Challenges I ran into

We encountered several challenges along the way such as Wi-Fi connectivity issues and problems with nearly every member of our team's hardware.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Despite all the odds, we managed to complete and present our project, even though we ran into frustrating situations. Our team, encouraged each other and made up for one another's weaknesses.

What I learned

We definitely learned a lot over the course of the past 36 hours:

• Always take out a laptop from the available hardware
• Having easily accessible wifi is crucial and something we take for granted
• No teammate should be left behind and it is pushing through together which makes the hackathon such a great experience

What's next for BlackBox

If we had more time we would have loved to use amazon web services to use the Amazon Echo in order to make the interface more interactive and game-like. For instance, we would have made it so that the user could ask Alexa, where am I looking at and Alexa would have responded with the city or the famous monument which we have transported the user.

Built With

• arduino
• kinect
• node.js