Inspiration
Seeing how recent COVID-19 trends have been visualized, we wanted to gain experience using an established AR tool to try and model statistics in a more creative manner. We also wanted to delve a bit into data science principles using Python to further gain exposure to unique fields in computer science and how they can be applied in healthcare as well.
What it does
Our project parses the Yale COVID-19 online dashboard to gather information about the number of positive test cases the university has seen, and models it using EchoAR technology for a better visualizer of the data.
How we built it
We first applied webpage scraping tools such as the Requests and BeautifulSoup libraries in Python to gather the information from the webpage into an organized table. Then, we incorporated the data into Unity using EchoAR to visualize the data, which is a more intuitive way of understanding it as opposed to the original table format.
Challenges we ran into
One of the main challenges we ran into was how to parse Javascript instead of HTML using Python libraries. Initially, we were trying to scrape Stonybrook's COVID-19 webpage. When we found that the Requests library was unable to handle the Javascript-rendered page, though, we tried to use Selenium instead. Given more time, we would have continued researching and learning about the library to achieve our goal of visualizing Stonybrook's data. However, because of the time-limit, we decided to instead focus on data from Yale, which was represented in a more readable format for the libraries to parse. Other challenges include a lack of experience amongst our team members, but we did our best to circumvent this by using resources like Google or YouTube videos.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're very excited about the fact that we were able to experiment with and learn from new software like Unity and EchoAR. The hackathon presented an opportunity to try using technologies unfamiliar to us, and we are proud to have come up with a project with them. In addition, we are proud of our ability to think on our feet; the Javascript challenge mentioned above definitely gave us some trouble, but ultimately we were able to switch gears and pull together a complete project.
What we learned
In terms of technology, we learned about the difference between AR and VR, and how we can use EchoAR in conjunction with Unity to model objects and information. We also learned more about parsing webpages and interpreting datasets. In terms of general teamwork, we learned about how to collaborate on such a project without being in person, as well as how to divide up the work so we all get a chance to contribute and learn.
What's next for our project
Without the pressure of time, we will continue looking into how to parse Javascript-rendered webpages using Python. We still want to model Stonybrook's data, so this will be very useful in allowing us to do so. In addition, we want to scale our idea to more universities, such as the University of Maryland, or Harvard University. We also want to expand upon the AR model we developed for this project; for example, we will look into using a 2D grid to visualize multiple universities' data at once and compare them.
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