SprintAR

Inspiration

Based on the recent pandemic that is Coronavirus, a lot of buzz has surrounded the idea of remote work. Shopify has recently built an internal VR team for their employees to collaborate from home as to not risk spreading the virus. We decided to do a more open version of the software, but using only mobile phones and AR instead of VR sets. Furthermore, IoT technologies are becoming more and more popular. "A recent report by the International Data Corporation forecasts a compound annual growth rate of 13.6 percent from 2017 to 2022 for worldwide spending on IoT, rising to nearly $1.2 trillion in 2022." https://simpleprogrammer.com/emerging-technologies-iot/ One would also note a trend towards the emphasis on human-centric managerial approaches. This trend positively correlates with Project Management methodologies such as Scrum and Design Thinking which emphasizes the focus on people and empathy.

What it does

The idea was that you can create your own workspace, or join another person's workspace. Once you enter a workspace, you will have access to stickies (whiteboard coming soon!) and will be able to engage in real-time on things such as design sprints or product strategy brainstorm sessions. You can move stickies around, choose a color, and more.

Later, you would be able to view all the work you did in the AR session on your laptop to analyze and review later.

How we built it

We used Swift for the iOS app and used ARKit as the AR platform. We also used Figma for prototyping and HTML/CSS for our landing page.

Challenges we ran into

We had trouble with our Apple Developer account, as we couldn't download the app on more than one phone due to a membership issue. This made it difficult to test or even develop the collaborative platform that we wanted to. We also had an issue with vertical plane detection. Many walls are very smooth and the iPhone 8 Plus that we were using lacks good depth perception and so only rough walls would work. We also had to learn a lot about ARKit, to begin with.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Making the app look really good and work really fluidly. We tried to pay attention to the user experience a lot and we think we did a good job at establishing a baseline for what this app could be. We believe this application is very adaptable and scalable and has big potential for evolvement.

What we learned

Each team member learned something new, from prototyping to web development to AR development. As this is many of our team's first Hackathons, we developed a new perception of how Hackathon should operate and how to access help if we should need it. We all really enhanced our collaboration and technical skills.