shARe

A Virtual Anonymous Discussion Board Through Your Smartphone Camera Lens

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Inspiration

Our inspiration came from the idea of emergencies and to help out the people in distress. So, if there is a minor emergency such as a Room has been locked and someone is stuck inside. He/She can Mark the place and comment it through the AR App allowing everyone in the nearby location to see and respond to it directly. This AR App allows you to receive help from not just your friends but by people who are nearby and are willing to help you out.

What it does

This AR App posts messages in AR using GeoLocation of the user which allows people around the user with the App to see it and post messages themselves in real-time. This is a great way to help someone in distress, as sometimes they are unable to contact relatives, but someone might see their message from this App This AR App could be used as a social network to connect various people to each other.

How we built it

For the AR portion of the App we used Swift for the Front-End and Back-End Portion of the apps while the while connecting to the Amazon Web Services through Dynamobd as the database. The website is made using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript with a small hint of the Google Maps API and the Facebook Login API with the website being hosted on Firebase. Facebook Login API is used for authentication of the user to login into the App itself, to start marking points around you. It was also used for the website to login the user into their screen which shows where the markers are placed! Google Maps API is used mainly for the website to view the markers around you.

Challenges we ran into

Working with Amazon Web Service's Dynamobd for the back-end portion of this AR Hack. All of us were new to developing in iOS, using Swift and also using Amazon Web Services which made it very hard but an ambitious project! Another major difficulty we ran into was even though we are doing a iOS/Swift Hack, only one of us had a iPhone to test it on and 2 Macbooks which slowed down our progress and set us back on our timeline.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Throughout this hackathon, we had problems with programming in Swift as it was a new take for all of us. Throughout the duration of this hackathon, two of our members worked for the entire time to ensure that the AR App was completed. We are proud that even though we divided this into two mini projects, The Web Portion and the AR App itself, we were able to communicate between each other and be on the same path to avoid future problems.

What we learned

Throughout this hackathon, the team members who programmed the AR portion of the App did not know Swift and learnt the language on Friday and went on to finishing the hack well before the deadline of this submission. Additionally, none of us knew Firebase and learning it along the way was a struggle for us, but we were able to come through and have the Firebase portion of the application working!

What's next for shARe

Currently only supported for iOS devices, we want to furthur this application by getting support for Android and developing the Application for Android devices as we noticed only one of our team member was a Apple User while the rest were Android users and it would've been very beneficial if we hacked in Android!

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