Keep It Six

Governments around the world recommend social distancing to slow the spread of the virus, but how well can you judge 6ft? This app uses AR to quickly visualize that distance.

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Inspiration

Governments around the world recommend social distancing as an easy way to help slow the spread of the virus and flatten the curve. The usual guideline is for a minimum separation of about 6ft or 1.8-2.0m between people. But how well can you judge that distance? In my own experience, this gap was further than I had initially realized.

What it does

This app uses AR to help quickly visualize that separation distance. One simply has to tap a location to set the ground plane and then the app visualizes both a ring of bollards around that point and a ring around the user's current estimated position. The color of the user's ring changes from green (OK) to yellow (warning) to red (danger) as the distance between the user and the reference location closes.

How I built it

This app is built in Swift using ARKit for the recognition and SceneKit for the 3D drawing.

Challenges I ran into

  1. ARKit ground plane and distance estimations often require a bit of refinement.
  2. User-centric AR objects, such as the ring, tend to be harder to judge than I expected without additional AR objects in the scene.
  3. Plane and occlusion detection are still a bit problematic

What I learned

This was my first time working with ARKit, so definitely that!

What's next for Mind the Gap

Hopefully it will be on the AppStore soon, but there's still a bit of polish required.

In the meantime, you can follow the progress at keepitsix.com. I'd love to have some beta testers, if anyone is interested. Just email me at beta@.

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