Footprints

Inspiration

We bring people together with AR on Snap Spectacles. People today feel less connected and social despite endless opportunities for online connection. Tourists and outdoor adventurers spend significant time on social media finding experiences and recommendations from other travelers in their community. We want to build authentic hyperlocal communities for content sharing by enabling people to leave virtual trails to guide others to share their experience of a place.

The application has three key modes:

Searching: You start in this mode, seeing all the trails and messages people have left around you. From here you have two options
Creating: You can build your own trails for others to follow, leaving message bubbles narrating your experience
Exploring: Alternatively, you can pick a trail created by someone else and share their journey by walking through every step of their experience and also adding your own comments to their trail for future visitors

How we built it

We built this on Snap Spectacles using their new feature of Anchor Points that allow objects to persist across sessions. In addition we make use of their persistent storage to record everyone's messages so that other users can play them back. By comparing the user's position to detected Anchor Points around them, we can show the users trails around them.

Challenges we ran into

The key challenge was designing an experience that does not get in the way of your interaction with the world while also enabling you to connect with other's ideas. We wanted to put minimal assets in the user's field of view. Thus, we choose to leave a footprint trail on the ground behind the user along with a trailhead marker indicating the start of a trail. This way, creators are free to explore without anything obstructing their view.

Accomplishments we’re proud of

We are proud of our ability to work on our feet quickly adapting to Lens Studio, a new development environment for most of us on the team.

What we learned

From Founder’s Lab, we learned how to create a product that we are able to market to a group of investors. We are able to better share with others our project, but also why we believe it’s special and why we are committed to it.

What's next for Footprints

Plans:

Our first goal is to increase connection on a trail is to add more forms of interaction. Right now you can create memories, next we would add photos or 3d scans to show what a path looked like at different periods of time or in different seasons.
We want people to feel the vibrance of their community, so a simple next step would be to add vibrance to the color of footsteps based on how many people have gone on that path
This technology could be applied to countless fields such as creating running paths, guided tours, hikes, even as an improvement to directions.