RecyclAR

An Ecological AR Application for WHACK 2017

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UPDATE: We won Best Use of AWS and Best AR/VR Hack! Thank you to the judges and mentors that helped us develop this project!

Inspiration

Recycling may seem easy but many of us actually don't do it properly! This problem is especially prevalent on college campuses where students are often in too much of a hurry to make sure they are only recycling the right waste in the right containers.

RecyclAR provides a seamless solution to this pressing problem!

Want to learn more? Check out this article! link

What it does

RecyclAR is an iOS mobile application that uses ARKit to show our users in real time if their waste is recyclable or not! Simply open our app and place your waste in front of your camera and we do the rest!

How we built it

We used ARKit and Google Cloud Vision API to classify objects that our users place in front of their iPhone cameras. We let our users know if the object is recyclable or not by placing a label directly on the object in question.

We also keep track of our users' recycling habits and rank our users on a leaderboard to encourage our users to keep recycling! Check out the current leaderboard! RecyclARLeaderboard

We integrated all of our scripts and are running our website all via AWS. Specifically, in this project we used, IAM to manage our permissions and credentials, DynamoDB to store our user information such as phone number, name and number of recycled objects, Mobile Hub for testing and deployment of our iOS app, Cognito to store and sync multiple users device data, EC2 instance to host our leaderboard website and finally Route53 to establish a DNS.

We also used Twilio API to allow our users to register on our leaderboard website.

Challenges we ran into

Since we wanted to build a robust application that could be used by multiple users at a time with low latency, we were forced to focus on the efficiency of our scripts along with employing many AWS services.

Integrating multiple languages from Swift and python to HTML and CSS with multiple APIs and multiple AWS services was difficult, to say the least.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This was the first time we worked with both ARKit and Swift (for iOS development). We are very proud that we were able to finish a fully functional iOS app!

We have also never used so many AWS services for a single project so we are also very happy that we were able to integrate all of them with our app.

What we learned

Programming in Swift is hard and not for the faint of heart. We will definitely be taking some online courses before we jump into another Swift related project to cut down the debugging time.

What's next for RecyclAR

We are looking into putting our application on the App Store! Keep a look out for us in the near future!!!

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