Sova | Devpost

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3D Mockup of Potential Final Product

Inspiration

While discussing potential ideas, one of our team members shared a personal story that resonated with the entire team. On the first day of classes, he encountered a visually impaired student who was struggling to find the room for one of his courses. He took time out of his busy schedule to help the student locate his class, having to guide them carefully through the campus which had many alleyways.

He shared with us the discontent he felt seeing the student struggle so much with simple navigation. He stated his desire to help the student, and it was an issue that we all agreed needed to be fixed. We wanted to provide an alternative towards using braille, which is costly and often ineffective in nature.

How we built our product

Building our project took many steps. First, we came together as a team and spent almost an hour coming up with an idea that we felt was appropriate for the given theme and our skill level. Next, we delegated roles and set up repositories while also sharing socials so that we could easily send information between each other. One member worked on a website, another on API integration, and so on. We utilized the camera provided by the DeerHacks team and our knowledge of programming languages such as Python and Java to work on the back-end and develop the code such that our camera could recognize QR codes. We also utilized ElevenLabs and voice recognition to understand human speech and then used ElevenLabs to generate unique AI voiceovers.

Challenges faced and what we learned

During the construction of our project, we learned many invaluable lessons. Of our four team members, three of us have never been to a hackathon before, while one had only been to two other hackathons. As a result, we were quite inexperienced and had to learn many lessons through simple trial and error. We learned the importance of proper communication, as there were multiple times where our lack of communication created issues in pushing code and pitching our ideas. We learned how important AI has become in the building process and realized the sheer amount of failure you need to endure before your product can resemble any form of success.