BURST

Barcelona image
Sydney image
Chicago image
MIT image

Inspiration

We had never worked with augmented reality before and believed there was no better time to learn how to use it than at HackMIT.

What it does

Our prototype recognizes landmarks in images, and gives a brief synopsis on each travel destination as well as links for further information.

How we built it

We used the Unity engine, alongside Vuforia and Paint3D in order to make an augmented reality user experience. Paint3D was utilized to create all the 3D models showcased, and all information was obtained via Wikipedia. Photos obtained via Google Images.

Challenges we ran into

All of us came into this hackathon with little relevant coding experience – and a lot of time was spent learning how to build an Android app with Unity, and how to integrate an AR engine into our solution. We had further plans for integrating multiple APIs, but because of the time constraint this proved extremely difficult, as we just finished our prototype application by the end of the hackathon. This said, we’re hopeful for the development of these features in the future!

Our Accomplishments

We were successful in gaining proficiency in AR development and were able to program an application that had our own 3D models over a wide array of destination images. It also provided an accurate summary of the location recognized consistently and in a variety of lighting conditions.

What's next for BURST?

There are a lot of different directions we could take our prototype. For one, we could integrate machine learning into our target detection scripts – so we’re able to identify cities worldwide beyond what we’ve pre-specified. We’d like to superimpose multiple labels at once over images we use – enabling us to label points of interest within each image we take. In addition, we could integrate third party APIs to potentially provide weather conditions, a map, or even travel information to your scanned location – making the app like a one stop shop towards paradise. Not to mention, while the app currently runs on Android, we built it under Unity to ensure seamless, cross-platform compatibility – we’d like to test iOS and Windows capabilities soon.