Inspiration
Our inspiration for Sustainable She was a collective passion for raising awareness about the environment and empowering women owned businesses.
The Bangladesh clothing factory disaster and similar events around the world have inspired us to take a stand against the fast fashion industry. Fast fashion brands and supply chains create bad working conditions, environmental disasters, and even human tragedy. Despite this, relatively few people are truly conscious of the impact their clothing buying habits have on the world. Sustainable She makes it easy for people at any knowledge level to make an impact for the social good. Our application is a highly scalable and universally accessible method for helping individuals develop sustainable clothing consumption.
Ines Said created a number of environmentally conscious apps at previous hackathons and that inspired us to do the same for this project. Two of us also want to start our own companies and use of this app would lead to growth in female owned businesses by facilitating the rise in popularity of female owned brands. SUCCESS begins with SUPPORTING other women! Cheers.
Learn more about the Sustainable She Idea!
What it does
The Sustainable She app enables women to scan clothing brands on storefronts, signs, and tags using AR technology and receive ratings and information about how sustainable that brand is. The app then gives you alternative women owned sustainable fashion brands that you can shop from instead.
How we built it
We built our mobile app using Unity with Vuforia Engine for image recognition of the clothing brand logos and 3D model rendering, and C# for the navigation pages. We also used Google Cloud for sign in authentication and Google Firebase as our database to store key value pairs of brand names and ratings.
Challenges we ran into
Unity and GitHub compatibility is a joke! They're painful to work with, haha. We wanted to use version control for our project but Unity's project settings files don't play well with feature branches. We got around messy merge conflicts by exporting Unity scenes and sending them to Ines. Working together virtually was a unique challenge as well. We had many team calls on Discord to sort out confusion about the work distribution and implementation details of the project. It was fun finding solutions together!
We were all using AR for the first time and it was a very big challenge to be able to build our first AR app in just 24 hours.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Honestly, we are very proud of our collaborative efforts across the team, and our ability to find solutions to our own problems in a structured and well thought out manner while also creating a mobile application to benefit the greater good as an end goal. - Dawn Palmer
What we learned
We learned so much! Ines and I learned how to use Unity's Vuforia Engine for image recognition and I learned more about how to navigate the Unity UI. Dawn gained valuable experience in mobile app UI development that she can use in her VR/AR class this semester!
Expand Your Horizon Track
This app took data from another app called “Good on you”.. Good on you is an app that lets you search a brand and see a sustainability rating. We expanded the horizon of this app by adding an AR scanner ! Instead of searching for a brand, the user can just point their phone at the logo and get instant results in AR. We also added the feature to suggest sustainable women owned businesses.
What's next for Sustainable She
We have concrete steps for the future of Sustainable She:
- Implement OCR to convert clothing brand logos to text
- Connect mobile app to Google Firebase to dynamically pull ratings
- Implement web scraping to pull ratings from a reputable site (ex: goodonyou)
- Add an AR feature that displays better women-owned clothing brand suggestions
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