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MIT under water
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East Campus courtyard (without AR)
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East Campus courtyard through our application
Innovation’s mindset is to build on existing technology, improving efficiency and fool-proofing everything around us. The problem is that this mindset believes in unlimited growth. This is the root of the environmental crisis. We are consuming earth’s resources at a rate that could make us the last generation to appreciate much of the planet’s natural beauties and assets that keep us alive. We need to think long term, looking ahead to guarantee that many further generations will live in a sustainable world that takes only what it needs and gives just as much back to sustain a natural balance, nurturing all life for a long, long time to come.
Inspiration
We started our project by thinking of ideas that could combine different platforms for some sort of purpose. We first decided to do a project that would, somehow, consider ways to help the environment, address the effects of climate change, and think about natural disasters. We wanted to learn about augmented reality, and use a cloud system. Niantic inspired us to challenge ourselves to follow the path of AR, despite the fact that none of us had previous experience working on AR.
What it does
RealFuture provides the opportunity to show the users the world around them, as it will look in a not-very-far future. We want to show the drastic effects that climate changes is causing and will continue to cause to our planet. The idea of our project is to raise awareness of what we are doing to the planet and what will happen if we don't address the issues and find sustainable solutions.
How we built it
RealFuture AR features were developed through Unity, Vuforia, and C#. We used Android developer to create an app that would connect to a phone's camera and search the location of the user. The location data would them be used to do an analysis of what effects of climate change could potentially occur at such location. For the purposes of the hackathon, we limited our use to Boston area. The app would them show effects of climate change using augmented reality.
Challenges we ran into
-We had to learn how to use Unity to create AR environment.
-We had difficulties creating an app that could be launched in our cellphones.
-Getting the camera to work, as we were overlapping images by accident.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
-We learn how to design AR environments as a team!
-We have a functional AR app that connects to different APIs
-We are using technology to create awareness of an issue we care about
What we learned
Technical skills to develop AR applications. This was perhaps the most exciting part of our project. We came to HackMIT with no idea of what our project would be but the past 24 hours became a journey to learn and develop our project using AR. As this hackathon is coming to an end, we can say that we are leaving with a better understanding of AR and many more projects to come. We already have ideas of what else we can design with similar interfaces.
What's next for RealFuture
We would like to expand the locations where our app can work. Creating different simulations through AR for different locations around the world. Ideally, we want to show an honest representation of how climate change may affect our planet in the future if we don't take actions about it. For some of those scenarios, we already know it's too late, but we can still prevent others.
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