shARe

Helps you be familiar, faster

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Inspiration

Approximately three days ago, our group, Virtual Spotter, decided to set our minds to helping people and communities connect with one another. We wanted to enable and empower people to take the first step and connect over shared hobbies, organizations, or even jokes.

What it does

shARe is an Augmented Reality mobile application which enables people and communities to connect and learn more about one another in new or unfamiliar settings. Our app takes in an image of a custom emblem on a name card and uses augmented reality to display user-shared information that would not necessarily be apparent at a first glance.

How we built it

We utilize an Android app front end to capture input and display our augmented reality prompts. The input is processed through the ARCore, which gives us our key to match with our desired information in Firebase.

Challenges we ran into

We had trouble working with new or unfamiliar technologies including Java/openCV/JSON; however, these were mostly worked through. Integration of the various moving parts was the most difficult step, and had to involve substitutions and changes where needed to account for libraries and other idiosyncrasies.

Not enough sleep.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We have a functioning app.

What we learned

Hackathons are fun!

What's next for shARe

The possibilities are endless with augmented reality and the ability to display pretty much anything whenever and wherever one would want it to be. As far as our app is concerned, in the short term, having a seamless integration with an established OCR/object recognition toolkit such as the Google Cloud will be the first priority in polishing up icon matching.

In the long term, we can expand the use cases from just name tags to encapsulate businesses that want to integrate data into their logos. For example, a store could display sales or Yelp reviews, or simply a colorful design to entice customers in.

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