Social Well

Browse your social networks in virtual reality

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Inspiration

We were inspired to create an application thats bring people together. By using virtual reality, the content feels more immersive and personal. This causes a stronger connect between the user and their friends on a social network.

What it does

Display all of the user's social media connections in virtual reality. The user can choose a topic to receive more information about. They can thumbs up the content to retweet it or swipe away harassing content to block the offending user.

How we built it

We used Unity and the Oculus Rift to program the application. We are using Amazon Web Services Lambda to connect to the various social networks. This will allow us to update the application and add more social networks without needing to modify the code on the Oculus Rift.

Challenges we ran into

We reached the Twitter API rate limit many times over the course of the hackathon and were unable to get more tweets for a half hour. We decided to cache the tweets between uses. This means that the tweets may be several minutes delayed, but will allow the application to always run. We also tried to implement voice recognition, to search content, but didn't have enough time to integrate it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This is the first time any of us has programmed an application for the Oculus Rift. We are proud that we were able to get a successful application created in time.

What we learned

We learned how to program a Unity project using C#. We also learned how to connect to different social networks, including Twitter, Instagram, and reddit.

What's next for Social Well

We will implement sign-in to allow the user to see more personalized content. We are also working on compatibility with Android Daydream to allow the user to use this application on their mobile phone.

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