gARffiti

Drawing Demo: King Piggie
Drawing Demo: 5 AM coding sessions
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Inspiration

Our group was inspired by the vibrant graffiti art that covers almost every corner of LA. We thought that graffiti art, combined with augmented reality (AR) technology, could be an interesting new artistic and social medium. Artists can now create interactive and immersive experiences for their audience. By using AR technology, artists can bring their murals to life, adding elements such as animations, sound effects, and even interactivity.

Additionally, an augmented reality graffiti app could provide a way for artists to showcase their work digitally, without having to worry about the physical limitations of their medium. With an AR app, an artist can create a piece of art that can be viewed and experienced by people all over the world.

What it does

Augmented reality Drawing: The user can utilize just their phone camera to create digital art that persists and can be shared, with a variety of brushes, undo/redo brush strokes, and choose colors from a built-in palette. Social Aspect: The user can share their AR drawing, like/dislike other drawings, and customize a personal art portfolio that can be seen by anyone.

How we built it

Using Swift, Apple's ARkit API, and Firebase, we built a resilient full-stack IOS application that covers all of the user's needs. AR functionality was completed using Apple's ARKit, and our social aspects were all created based off of popular existing social media such as Reddit and Youtube. Swift enabled us to create a user-friendly interface that can reach an immense audience.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into challenges integrating our AR functionality with a social media aspect, having to balance storing large amounts of location data and practicality and optimization of the app left us with some tough design choices that ended up with us scrapping some of our favorite ideas for the app. We still plan to implement these features in the app, since it's something all of us are passionate about.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're particularly proud of our usage of augmented reality in our app. We spent a lot of time messing around with augmented reality drawings of our own, which further convinced us of our app's compelling idea. Altogether, we are very proud of how well we worked together as a team and our end product.

What we learned

As newbies to mobile development, we learned a lot about Swift and IOS, while also learning a ton about augmented reality and version control.

What's next for gARffiti

We want to keep working on our project and one day publish it to the app store. Definitely keep an eye out for a bigger, more refined version of gARffiti!