FoodBankAR

Inspiration

The inspiration for this project was from a food policy course I am currently taking. In this course we talk about the struggles lower income households have to access adequate amounts of nutritious food. Not only is there an economic barrier to obtaining adequate food, but a social barrier as well. We hope that by creating this filter, we can reduce the stigmatization associated with food bank usage and encourage others to donate in a fun and interactive way.

What it does

This filter gives users a fun way to choose which item to donate to their local food bank. By removing the issue of researching which items are most in need and making it easy to decide, we hope to encourage more donations. Additionally, the use of the filter may help inspire other people in the user’s group of friends to also donate.

How we built it

This project was built in SparkAR with graphics done in Adobe Photoshop. We used SparkAR features such as Person Segmentation, Face Tracking, Emitters, and the Patch Editor for logic.

Challenges we ran into

Our original plan was to look up trends using a Facebook API but when we discovered that API calls were not allowed, we needed to change our idea quickly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This was our first time using the SparkAR hackathon and half of our team had no coding experience (despite extensive knowledge on food insecurity)

What we learned

We learned that relatively simple filters can have a strong effect on changing user behaviour. People who tested our filter said that they were much more likely to donate now that they had something to help them decide the item(s).

What's next for FoodBankAR

We plan to publish the effect and work with local food banks to raise awareness for donations. In addition, the accessibility of FoodBankAR allows us to easily spread awareness about this issue in the community with no net cost. This can be incorporated in future health awareness virtual conferences and webinars.

Built With

• sparkar