Sant : eco-friendly yet smart AR cardboard toy kit

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  AR-enabled cardboard robot

Inspiration

The goal of our project is to reduce the green house gas generated from plastic toy industry. We introduce new types of high tech toys produced from eco-friendly cardboard material. In addition, we offer the mixed reality/AR platform for players and educators to play the toy kits with gamification scenarios. Our goal is to contribute in the reduction of the usage of new plastic toy and the decrease of thousand to million tonnes of fossil fuel-based plastic. Our team strongly believes that our cardboard kits will demonstrate the notable example of combining eco-friendly material with augmented reality technologies to transform the toy industry to become a circular economy.

What it does

Users can assemble their cardboard toys from scratch. Then, they can use our AR platform to scan the physical toys to interact with virtual gamification scenarios. In addition, players can challenge their friends in AR geospatial mode where they can use the same cardboard toys to play with nearby scenarios based on their locations.

How we built it

Our team has gone from strength to strength by listening to our customer feedback. Then, registering patent and the industrial design for our products has been a painful process. Revolutionizing an industry doesn't happen overnight. It should be taken place in a second when inventors, mechatronic engineers, industrial designers and AI scientists working together in a such long period of time. We have built AR platform with PBR rendering and physics-based collision from scratch native Android, native iOS (coming soon). Similarly, we have designed more than 20 versions of cardboard robots to finalize one with IP. It's been challenging process for a small team like us but it's worth.

Challenges we ran into

The main players in the toy manufacturing industry have not changed the materials used to produce their products in the last 40 years. Therefore, our solution should meet the following criteria: inexpensive, recyclable, educational and edutainment to compete with the giants in the industry. In addition, we have met more than 2000 students and teachers, we realized that users would love to generate their own AR content. As a consequence, we have been developing the authoring tool in the AR platform. Users can make up their own towers to challenge their friends to play with cardboard toy kits.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The main benefit of our solution is to provide 100% recyclable toy kits for children in the Southeast Asia region and the world. The cardboard material can be recycled again after the disposal process. Second, thanks to the cardboard material, the price of the toy kits is reduced significantly, which makes them affordable in most of the developing countries.

What we learned

We understand that user experiences should be entertaining and unique. Users can use our solution to light it up regardless where they are or who they are.

What's next for Sant : eco-friendly yet smart AR cardboard toy kit

First, our team is going to finish the core loop for our application to motivate users to play and learn in AR space. Then, we are planning for a mixed reality hand-free experience with AR glasses for end-users. Our team's goal is to develop our application in commercial AR glasses. In addition, our team has a plan to integrate VPS feature from ARCore geospatial API to allow users to play at bigger scale of game scenarios. Lastly, our business goal is to release 1 million to 2 million toy kits to reduce the same number of plastic toy kits in the industry in the next 3 years.

Built With

• arcore
• deeplearning
• eco-friendly
• filament
• java
• robotics
• sceneform