Bright

Description

According to the WHO, over 250 million people around the world suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, 81% of whom are above the age of 50. Many face significant challenges in daily life. Some of leading solutions for a variety of vision impairments are extremely expensive headsets that essentially provide a zoomed-in view of the world.

Bright is a seed to make faces familiar again and everyday challenges manageable.

Bright runs as an app on Microsoft HoloLens and allows users to zoom in to a customizable level, hear written text (e.g. books, newspapers, documents, TV) as spoken speech, recognize other people nearby (giving names for stored people, and age/gender/emotion estimates for others), and contact others in the case of an emergency.

We built our solution in Unity, implementing various services from Microsoft’s Azure Cognitive Services and Twilio for phone calls.

Team Members

Ashish Bakshi, Cesar de Castro, Andreas Dias, Jan Simson, Charlene Yu

Location

We worked on the 6th floor of the MIT Media Lab (Building E14), in the Multipurpose Room, Table 30.

Development

We used:

Platform: Microsoft Hololens / Universal Windows Platform Development Tools: Microsoft Visual Studio 2017, Unity, Github SDKs: Windows SDK APIs: Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services, Twilio Components used not created at hackathon: Mixed Reality Toolkit, Wontonst Twilio SMS on Unity (https://github.com/wontonst/twilio-sms-unity). Assets: None

Built With

Submitted to

Reality Virtually Hackathon at the MIT Media Lab Returns Year 3 January 17 - 21, 2019
- Winner Best in Health & Wellness
- Winner Best AR

Created by

I originated the idea, recruited team members, and led the team in the development of the prototype and pitch presentation.

Ashish Bakshi
I worked on the logo design and branding, as well as video editing and sound editing. I collaborated with others on problems solving to create the product.

Charlene Yu
I helped develop the zoom and facial recognition software. I also woked together to problem solve a lot of the features and creation of the product.

Andreas Dias
Princeton '17 Computer Science, Entrepreneurship, & Tech Public Policy
I facilitated the problem-solving process, provided brand strategy, creative direction, hands-on ux/ui and communication design to contribute shaping our award-winning AR project, Bright.

Cesar de Castro
I worked on general Unity troubleshooting, text recognition (OCR), zoom and the emergency call feature. In collaboration and dialog with the others I helped finding and solving problems during the design and creation of Bright.

Jan Simson
Behavioural Data Science Student & Developer from Germany