Synchra

Inspiration

Everyone has had a bad experience with a group project at least once. Whether it be fearing to speak up, uneven workloads or poor communication, it all stems down to one basic fact: we are unaware of people's intentions and emotions in the moment, despite being able to read their body languages. We ought to use our social proprioception to the fullest. If we were all a little more in-tune with each other, it would smoothen out many of the issues we have during group projects.

What it does

During group meetings, you wear a ring with a holographic interface that provides you with live insights as to your emotional aligment with the rest of the team, as well as a participation counter to keep you aware in the moment.

The ring tracks your heart rate variability and skin conductance in order to be able to analyze your emotions, and the hologram shows you how many times you have contributed to the meeting (through a double-tap gesture that you perform), the group's current emotional intensity (ranging from calm to excited), and the flow state alignment of every member with each other.

How we built it

We used Figma Make to write the code for the holographic interface through Typescript and CSS, focusing on a futuristic, sci-fi look. To make the demo video, we used Scenery to create an augmented reality scene, to make the demonstration more interactive. In order to present real-time data for the heart rate variability and skin conductance, we generated some data using Numpy, and performed some statistical analysis to produce the final results.

We also trained a Random Forest model to be able to predict the emotion of each person, so that it could work with live data. To further make the interface more interactive, we used TensorFlow to analyze real-time video data to capture the double-tap gesture and increment the participation count based off the number of times a person performed that action, despite not being able to add that in the Figma Make version of the product.

Challenges we ran into

During the ideation phase, we brainstormed several ideas, but we had a hard time narrowing down what ideas we were going to focus on. Our main ideas went through a lot of refinement before we settled on one specific goal. We also faced multiple technical setbacks when using different platforms, but we persevered through them and combined all of our work into one final product.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of all of the technical details that we added into the project, from the styling of the hologram to the augmented reality scene for our demo video. Though, what we are most proud of is our teamwork. Our collaboration was what truly brought our design together; despite doing very different parts of the project, we all were committed to bringing it all together and presenting a polished final product.

What's next for Synchra

We would like to focus more on expanding the features that we currently have, and make it more customizable. For example, instead of one singular gesture to increment the counter, it could become customizable to better suit the user's preferences. We could also customize the interface, and the actual ring options available. We would also find more reliable ways to analyze people's emotions; we could use tonal indicators in speech to give more context to the emotional state of each user.