Inspiration
COVID times are tough, and quarantine is cold and lonely. However, what is stopping us from being happy and enjoying life like we always do? Our website is a reminder of just that; to maintain a positive attitude (via smiling!) and take your well-being into your own hands.
If you're here and COVID is over, our inspiration came with our realization that many subtle joys of life are ignored because we have grown overstimulated, and thus rarely satisfied with our day to day lives. We look forward to vacations or parties, so when that is no longer an option, we feel morose and fatigued. Instead, we should pay attention to the chirping birds, the warm sunlight; peer into the puddles on the street, and see another world beneath the shimmering ripples. So start smiling, and you too will look at life from a new perspective, and notice these minute, but beautiful details. :)
This being many of our members' first hackathon we decided to implement something short and sweet.
What it does
Bring together a group of friends and smile in front of the camera. Once everyone in the group is smiling, our software will automatically take a photo after 3 seconds. This mean you don't need to set a self timer and try to run back to make the photo in time! (It also means you can make fun of your friends for not smiling "properly")
How we built it
Our website is built using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript with a website template, however, we implemented the main functionality in Python due to time constraints and bugs. Face bounding and smile detection were implemented using OpenCV.
Challenges we ran into
opencv.js was not cooperating with us, we even went to 2-3 different mentors with OpenCV experience and could not resolve the issue. After wasting a couple of hours on this, we decided to use Python's OpenCV library since one of our members had experience with it. Unfortunately, we did not have enough time to integrate it with our website. As a result, our website (link below) just has a video element with your live camera feed without any functionality...
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Our Python code works! The face bounding and smile detection are actually pretty cool (by our standards). The website also looks awesome and has the live camera feed working.
What we learned
Working on HTML, CSS, JavaScript and GitHub was a new experience for some of our members, so we struggled a lot with the technical details and the website template. JavaScript OpenCV was also more complex than Python OpenCV, giving us a lot of trouble. Working with others was also not as easy as we imagined, and emphasized the importance of communication.
What's next for Smiling into Ready, Set, Action!
If we were to continue this project, our first order of business would be to integrate our Python functionality into the JavaScript on the website. Then perhaps transitioning to mobile devices (with responsive HTML and making sure our camera is working), and maybe our own domain name on a web server. We also want to allow users to make their own profiles, so we could save their past smiles, to remind the user of good times, and how happiness is always there if you seek it. Having additional features such as image filters would also spice up the website and provide some additional variety to the user's photos.
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