Inspiration
The social media age has reached a pivotal turning point--there have been a prevalence of new applications, but few if any have taken advantage of new technologies. The next era of social media will incorporate new technologies such as artificial intelligence, and of course, augmented reality.
What it does
This app empowers users to capture, share, and view memories, news, and random events around them. These are embedded into objects in an augmented reality space that the users can create and modify. Users can further interact with friends' objects and other people in the area's objects.
Qubme is a company that focuses on sharing memories. We believe that the power to modify an augmented reality space, to write your own story into the fabric of your community (literally), and to then share those stories is the greatest way to improve how people communicate, live, and connect. By having the entire world as your canvas, Qubme empowers people to cry harder, to laugh harder, to share harder.
How we built it
Right from the moment we pitched Qubme within our group, everyone pining for ideas, we knew we were onto something special. Immediately, we all started designing the project. Qubme consists of three special parts: the Augmented Reality Camera that loads, saves, and captures pictures and videos within a cube variable, the highly connected, specific Database that stores thousands of pictures for AR recognition, and the clean, sleek, and user-friendly UI that ties everything together. The AR Camera system and UI were both developed through XCode-9 in Swift through two separate two-person teams. The AR Camera conglomerates many features of current camera systems and improves on them; the UI system focuses on a clean functionality that exactly focuses on the AR Camera and making the user experience as friendly as possible. Then the Database was planned and executed from all four of us through Firebase. The Firebase database genuinely captures an incredibly broad range of pictures, and therefore, experiences. This highly connected database is the engine that supports both the UI and AR Camera and makes Qubme the foremost option on the market. Efficient, lightning-fast, and easy to retrieve, Firebase allowed us to reach the potentials of our experience-sharing network.
Challenges we ran into
Team Dynamics while working on an idea this engaging stymied many efforts to progress faster on the project. The Database provided a formidable challenge: for one, we had to choose which database that would effectively cater to our goals, and two, we had to learn how to use this database in a relatively short amount of time. Swift, although useful, is not the most prevalent language most programmers know, and for a group of freshman in college, we all had to study and practice tediously hard through a difficult process of trial and error to learn Xcode, Swift, and Firebase. This experience is much of ours first times working on a project with an endscope this big, which provided problems when tackling the problem: we switched from Expo to Xcode, Azure and SQL to Firehouse.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
The greatest accomplishment is building something we're proud of, something we can look back on and view as vital to our growth as programmers, entrepreneurs, and students. We are proud of our diligence, our determination, and our loyalty to this project; It took maturity, skill, and an inordinate amount of fervor to carry us through 36 hours without sleeping more than 2 hours at a time. We are also proud of creating something that has a place in our current market, something that is open-ended and receptive to be iterated upon throughout the years. We are proud of our pugnacious spirits to always combat something new, to always seek for answers when there seemingly are none.
What we learned
We've learned the fundamentals of Swift, AR, app development, complex database interaction, and much, much more. We've learned from each other from being able to see how hard we worked toward a goal, we've learned from ourselves in how truly free and empowered we felt when we realized the immense depth of opportunity at our fingertips. We learned of our abilities as heady creatives, and other's abilities as compassionate teachers. Foremost, we've learned about the importance of cherishing great memories with even better people.
What's next for Qubme
We plan to continue on improving the AR camera's resolution, location tracking, cube placement, and interaction. This can be achieved through refining the code for supreme functionality and accessibility. We also plan on adding different object options, user interaction, picture filters, and videos to the AR Camera functions. We plan on further developing the UI by improving on its strength as a central tie-in to our AR Camera, but also to work on ts ability to connect other people to each other without even having to access the AR Camera. Lastly, we plan on optimizing the database for the highest amount of cherished memories shared and important memories made.
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