Stream

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Inspiration

We are trying to conquer a major problem for parents at or above lower middle-class socioeconomic status. Tablets and iPads have found their way into the homes of approximately 50% of US parents. Parents rely on the devices to occupy their kids but simultaneously fear hindering their children’s development through overuse of technology. Many studies and articles urge parents to push their kids off screens and to interact with the real world, yet parents who are looking to restrict iPad time struggle to let go of its benefits as a distraction. We wanted to find a way to use the iPad to inspire kids to do more hands-on projects and engage with the world around them, all without letting go of the iPad's distraction capabilities.

What it does

Stream is currently in a barebones stage, but a server can send clients a feed of youtube videos. The app has a kid friendly UI which engages users. Users can scroll through a feed of videos which will automatically play when the video is in view on-screen.

How I built it

We used the iOS library in Unity to create the app. There was a youtube video streaming plugin which I combined with my platform in order to pull videos from youtube rather than store them in the app. We used Adobe CC to create a UI, and integrated the two pieces at the end.

Challenges I ran into

Could not install the latest Xcode without updating my computer OS, so project was made in Unity, but Unity is not really designed for streaming videos. Had to make a networking system to send videos to the iPad.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Getting the networking system to run smoothly, and getting youtube videos to run properly on my platform.

What I learned

I should use a better platform than Unity for this project when the project needs to run more quickly, Unity has a bunch of unnecessary overhead when trying to run the app.

What's next for Stream

Continuing work on the prototype, testing with children in our target age range 4-8, and doing market research to evaluate the download tendencies of parents in our demographics.

Built With

• unity
• youtube