LiquidOverlay

An overlay for Liquid Hacks 2021, with the goal of giving better accessibility, features, and ways to keep up to date with Team Liquid.

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Inspiration

LiquidOverlay is a program made to primarily assist the HoH and Deaf communities worldwide in their gaming journeys and help with ease of use. Upon listening to Steven Spohn's speech at the LiquidHacks opening ceremony, we were able to see how gaming can make a difference in a person's life. Specifically, the lives of those that need assistive technology. We were inspired to make a difference. The idea started in a Google Doc where we compiled a list of options for the competition to enhance the gaming experience and accessibility. When we researched the accessibility options offered for the competitive FPS game "Valorant", we saw that there were none offered to address this community. Given that this game is heavily reliant on sound, from agents' abilities to footsteps and gunshots, we realized that to be able to play this game competitively, this is a necessary tool. We wanted to level the playing field for the HoH and Deaf community.

What it does

We decided to make an overlay that uses visual effects to help deaf people "see" sound. These effects will help show where the sound was last heard in-game for the duration of the noise and will allow the HoH or Deaf player to be on the lookout for enemies. This would facilitate the process and allow them to visually see what the other players are hearing. This idea grew and we asked ourselves, "Why stop there?" What can we add to make this a tool for even more people? This led our team to look into Speech to Text to be able to translate for people that speak different languages than those used in the game.

How we built it

It was built with 99.9% Kotlin, we utilized google speech API to convert audio into text, we added

Challenges we ran into

Some of the challenges we ran into were coding with very minimal C, but still accessing the windows API to overlay the application.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to draw to Windows API without using one line of C!

What we learned

Learned a lot about Native code, how to pace ourselves and not rush ahead.

What's next for LiquidOverlay

We want to add Machine learning to detect footsteps and gunshots better since right now only a decibel system is utilized.

Run the .jar file to create the GUI, then click "start overlay" to overlay your game!

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