Closet Buddy

Ever spent what felt like hours deciding on an outfit for the day? Want to know how that shirt you saw at the mall would look with the rest of your wardrobe? If so, Closet Buddy is perfect for you!

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Inspiration

Many times, it can be a struggle to come up with and envision good outfit combinations, often taking a lot of time and effort. We observed this from not just personal experience, but also noticed that this was a common issue for people across all ages, particularly for teens and young adults. This is often due to the inconvenience of having to physically get dressed in order to try out multiple outfits, which leads to it taking forever to find the perfect outfit combination. Furthermore, we might see a piece of clothing that catches our eye at our local mall or shopping center, but it would be difficult to imagine how we can style it with our personal pieces at home. As a result, we were inspired to create an application or website that could solve this problem, and thus, Closet Buddy was created.

What it does

Closet Buddy is a website that gives users the convenience of having their entire wardrobe contained in a single digital device, be it on their phone or computer. Users are able to upload images of any articles of clothing they want, including ones they may see online or at a shopping center. As users upload their images, our AI tool will automatically crop out everything in the image except for the piece of clothing featured. With their wardrobes uploaded in this way, users will be able to easily mix and match different outfits that they want to style, making it much easier and convenient to do than if they were to have to actually wear everything to test it out. Additional features include users being able to save any outfits that stand out to them or that they may potentially want to style in the future.

How we built it

To actually build Closet Buddy, we used Visual Studio Code to type out the HTML code that would structure the webpage, as well as CSS in order to enhance the look and feel of the website. Firebase to store user-specific information.

Challenges we ran into

Initially, we planned on making Closet Buddy into a mobile Application through Android Studio. We spent the first half of Day 2 with this plan in mind, until we started running into multiple errors and issues that were difficult to resolve. Since none of us had extensive experience with Android Studio, we decided to discard the idea entirely, which was a risky decision, and instead we decided to change Closet Buddy into a website, with much less time than we had before. Throughout the actual web development experience, we ran into some challenges with formatting the website, and especially when it came time for integration, it was especially challenging for us to piece together everyone's separate assignments (i.e. integrating the actual AI tool into the website).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Nathan: Experimented with React and JS for the first time
  • Tim: Worked with Firebase for the first, successfully implementing Firebase's authentication and storage features. Images could be uploaded and viewed on the site by the original uploader only.
  • Yejin: Experimented with HTML and CSS for the first time, and learned more about what goes into front end development. This was my first website that I helped code from scratch! (Also first hackathon)
  • Idhant: Trained and implemented the ML model and experimented with Flask for the first time.

What we learned

For most of the members in our group, this was our very first hackathon, so we definitely learned a lot from this experience in terms of how we can improve for possible future hackathons or similar events. For instance, although we can't start coding or preparing the repository prior to the event, we found that it is really helpful to come prepared with an idea(s) in mind to waste as little planning time as possible. Also, since our idea of an AI wardrobe generator was pretty ambitious, we learned the importance of having alternatives and pivots in mind as we quickly realized that many of our ideas and designs were quite hard to actually put into fruition through coding and programming. Most importantly, integration, or connecting everyone's individual work together and putting it all into one cohesive project was definitely the most difficult part. From this, we learned how crucial active communication and teamwork was, since we had frequently communicate in order to understand what each of us were doing, provide real-time updates when a certain part was finished, and help each other out when one of us was struggling.

What's next for Closet Buddy?

Though we have a pretty solid outline of our Closet Buddy website, we still have some things aspects of the website that are in need of improvement, and more features we would like to add. For starters, we could improve upon the UI/UX design, so that users can upload their images and generate outfit combinations with more ease. We think it would also be cool to go back to our original idea of making Close Buddy into a mobile app, especially outside of the hackathon where we have more time to experiment with app development and build on our skills.

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