Inspiration
We were inspired by problems several of our team members and people we know have had when engaging with future projects.
What it does
Ucity makes civic engagement, authentic, transparent, and fun.
How do we do that? By using augmented reality to allow citizens to visualize future architectural projects and incentivize them to vote.
Why are we doing this? Three reasons
- Change is hard because people can’t imagine the future
- Community members want to have a valuable impact on their communities
- Citizens feel like they are left out of the planning process of their own community.
Ucity enables on-the-spot and remote voting while the user visualizes future building or project plans in augmented reality. When the user votes, they receive Ucity tokens that can be used to purchase goods and services in the local community.
Today, we are using NReal augmented reality glasses, but our future plans include an inclusive WebAR that requires only a web browser interface as well.
How we built it
...with blood, sweat, tears, and a lot of heart.
But some of the applications we used are:
- Unity to build the 3D AR environment and interface.
- Solana to mint our own Ucity tokens and the entire Solana blockchain ecosystem to manage our tokens.
- Node.js to transfer tokens from the Unity application to the user's wallet.
- 3DS Max to create or modify the architectural models.
- Nreal SDK for Unity as that is our current display.
- Nreal glasses as the display.
- Phantom Solana wallets to receive the Ucity tokens.
- Microsoft Azure Kinect cameras for the volumetric captures.
- MRKT as part of the Unity development process.
- Wix for our website.
- Figma and Miro for our Logo, UI, Visuals, slides. We also solicited real-world projects to incorporate into our demos, which took a lot of labor to
Challenges we ran into
- One of us knew solidity and Ethereum, but we had to learn the entire Solana ecosystem.
- Volumetric capture was low quality due to a lack of higher-end hardware.
- Unity crashing upon new package builds.
- Hand tracking to create a robust hand gesture interface in Unity using Nreal glasses.
- Integrating all of these various components was probably the most difficult.
- Cleaning up overly complex 3DS Max models required massive skill and time.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are incredibly proud of what we created by integrating Unity, 3DS Max models in location, and Solana blockchain altogether and making it WORK. We are all proud of each other for deep collaboration, taking risks, and learning new skills. Every team member showed up and rocked it.
What we learned
Solana - alot of Solana, how to integrate Solana with Unity, how to integrate Node.js with Unity, compressing 3d files, hand gestures, hot phones and hot glasses get laggy, architects need to export optimized 3D models, blockchain in general
What's next for Ucity
Road map: Going to the future, we plan to:
- Create high-resolution Volumetric Capture
- Incorporate greater accessibility by creating WebAR/ OpenAR version of the Ucity application.
- Write a white paper explaining our process.
- Create white label versions of the app for communities.
- Also incorporate Mapbox for accessibility.
- Connection to Identity
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