Inspiration

Our core inspiration was Minecraft and the nostalgic memories it provided us. We hoped to build a project that was at its core unique in execution and idea, while hopefully being enjoyable to play around with for everyone. At the same time, we wanted a project that would push what could be done in 24 hours, so this was a perfect fit.

What it does

Everything Cubed transforms a real room into a functional Minecraft environment with a 30 second scan from your iPhone.

How we built it

The project bridges a Python analysis pipeline with a Java-based Minecraft mod and an iOS companion app:

A iOS app connects directly to the Minecraft mod and streams data directly. The mod contains Local ML that is responsible for the processing and final result.

Challenges we ran into

One of the defining aspects of Minecraft is its blocky style. Unfortunately, Minecraft's imprecise style goes against the naturally precise real world. Beyond just being able to represent a room from a technical standpoint, we found trying to match the real-world environment in Minecraft closely felt very out of place. It took a lot of iteration to get this one right.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of how the application doesn't require the use of the internet or any external LLM via API, and how all ML operations was done locally. In fact, the mobile app can connect over the server via LAN. We think this goes a long way into improving the overall user experience - no third party required!

What we learned

We learned that you should not be afraid to be ambitious with your goals. We thought several times that we would have to scale down our project to meet the deadline, but where theres a will, there's a way!

What's next for Everything Cubed

We are going to focus on increasing the reliability of the current codebase, especially over the different methods of producing graphics, with plain video planned for the future. We would also like to improve several parts of the UI/UX that we didn't have time to implement given the focus on new features.