Inspiration
When AR Kit was announced we knew that we wanted to hack with it! We played around with a few ideas until we settled on the idea of leaving music in a physical location and accessing it through AR, helping people share music in a new and truly immersive way. Our thinking was that music is a greater way to express something: a feeling, a moment.
What it does
Bubbl.io allows you to leave Spotify tracks as "bubbles" in the real world! When they are tapped you can hear the track. Each bubble is one use, so it's a great way to connect with a stranger through a medium we all relate to.
How we built it
The core technology behind this project is Apple's new AR Kit. This allowed us to place the bubbles in an AR enviornment. The backend is a NodeJS server running Socket.IO allowing for real-time updates! We built the animations in Adobe After Effects, and using a plugin exported them into JSON data compatible for playback with Swift.
Challenges we ran into
It was a big challenge learning the AR Kit, there's a lot of complex stuff to figure out. Also deploying the Node server became an issue as Apple doesn't want apps to communicate over only IPv4 anymore, so we had to search for the easiest provider that could get us IPv6!
Accomplishments that we're proud of
The whole project! The concept is clean, the execution for 24 hours is to a standard we are all very happy with, and we like the design.
What we learned
Everything from Apple's new AR kit to exporting After Effects animations to JSON for Swift.
What's next for Bubbl.io
From the start we had the idea that Bubbl.io could actually also be used by artists to help promote new music. First we would implement a map view so people would know where to search for bubbles. After doing this imagine a new track being released exclusively a day early on Bubbl.io and you can only listen to it when you find the bubble! The artist could be holding a secret event at the location so when fans arrive they can not only hear the track first but also enjoy a cool event!!
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