COVID-19 Social Distancing Visualization App

We know it's hard to visualize how far 6 feet is without a tape measure. With our app you can see in AR how to socially distance!

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Inspiration

We wanted to provide a tool to assist people in visualizing what a safe distance is for social distancing! Our goal was to create an app that could tell you if someone was within 6 feet of you. A reach goal we had was to also implement the ability to measure if objects such as chairs in a classroom are properly spaced apart. Our hope was to address the COVID-19 and echoAR challenges!

What it does

Currently our main app is only able to render the echoAR model through Flutter/Unity. We have a second app created with Xcode and Reality Composer that allows us to visualize tables and chairs being 6 feet apart in augmented reality.

How we built it

We used Flutter to provide a cross-platform mobile application UI and combined it with Unity 3D to show our echoAR model. Our second app uses Xcode and Reality Composer and our third exploration uses TensorFlow for Image Classification and Object Detection for social distancing.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into challenges ranging from working virtually in different time zones to technical ones such as no prior experience with AR, mobile app development, and computer vision. We also had teammates on different systems which prompted us to use cross-platform frameworks such as Flutter and Unity. With our Flutter application we were not able to get ARCore/ARKit working properly and spent hours debugging issues which is what lead us to pivot to trying to get an iOS app working with some social distancing models/examples in an AR space.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our whole team is extremely proud of the effort we put into collaborating and learning technologies brand new to us. We were able to create a cross-platform mobile application, use new technology, create models in AR space, and explore social distancing models with object detection and classification in TensorFlow. We look forward to continuing our exploration into application development, AR, and computer vision after this hackathon.

What we learned

For our main application, we learned what goes into application development (Flutter), how AR works across different platforms (ARCore/ARKit) which prompted us to go towards learning Unity 3D. We also learned of echoAR over this weekend through sponsor workshops. Outside of this we also learned about Xcode and Reality Composer for iOS development and TensorFlow for object detection and classification towards our social distancing detection model. We also learned how to pivot rapidly multiple times through the course of this hackathon as we ran into different challenges and roadblocks

What's next for COVID-19 Social Distancing Visualization App

We hope to figure out how to enable AR in Flutter and combine it with the computer vision we learned in iOS to detect people and the distances between them.

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