Inspiration
We're four college students who love to travel, and we kept running into the same problem: filming the trip takes you out of it. Someone is always holding up a phone, and the best moments are over before anyone starts recording. We wanted a camera that's always paying attention but never in the way.
What it does
Roamory is an iPhone app that films your whole trip and keeps only the best moments, so you can enjoy the trip instead of watching it through a screen.
- Wear your phone. Clip it to a chest mount, open Roamory and tap Start. The screen goes dark, but the camera keeps filming.
- AI picks the moments worth keeping. Every few seconds, an AI "director" looks at what the camera sees. When something special happens, like a street performer, a stunning view or your friends bursting out laughing, it saves that clip. It lets the boring parts (waiting in line, walking down an empty street) disappear. Before you start, you can tell it what matters to you, like "my sister's graduation, she's in the red gown", and it keeps an eye out for that.
- Nothing is missed, even if it happened a moment ago. Roamory always remembers the last 45 seconds, so when the AI (or you) decides a moment is worth saving, the lead-up is saved too.
- You can save moments yourself, too. Press a volume button, a Bluetooth remote or your AirPods, and Roamory saves the last 45 seconds plus whatever comes next.
- Get your highlight video. At the end of the day, Roamory sends the saved moments to your laptop. There, an AI video editor puts the best shots in order and adds titles and music. The finished video shows up in your phone's photo library, ready to share.
How we built it
- iPhone (Swift/SwiftUI): an in-memory ring buffer of encoded HEVC samples. Unsaved footage never touches disk, and saves are written without re-encoding. At 20 Mbit/s the buffer takes about (20 × 45) / 8 ≈ 112 MB of RAM.
- Director: sends (60 / 10) × 5 = 30 frames/min to Apple Intelligence with structured JSON output.
- Studio (Python): a Bonjour-discoverable bridge with code pairing. It runs an AI agent headless in a job folder and checks the rendered video before the phone downloads it.
Challenges we ran into
- iOS won't run the camera in the background, so the app stays open behind a pure-black screen at brightness 0.
- Bugs you only find on a real phone: silent clips, a director that couldn't "hear" because of a timestamp mismatch, and the Simulator has no camera.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
- Saving a moment after it happens, fully automatic
- A live AI director with its own notes and a target save rate
- Full videos edited end to end
- Privacy by design: on-phone transcription, no unsaved footage on disk, API key kept in the Keychain
What we learned
- AI works better with context than with rules.
- AVFoundation in depth: HEVC buffers, passthrough writing and audio sessions.
- The best wearable camera was the phone we already had.
What's next for Roamory
- Adaptive frame rate to save battery
- Multi-day trips with pause and resume
- Group videos combining clips from friends' phones
- Sharing videos with the community
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