TapScroll | Devpost

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🗼 Inspiration

We saw that our phone screens get very dirty when eating and using them at the same time. Some will be bold and still use their phone despite the consequence and others will cringe at the idea of touching their phones with their greasy fingers. This inspired us to build an app that allows you to interact with your phone, without ever touching it! It is a small detail that can improve our everyday quality of life 😁

🔥 What it does

Simply launch the app, place your phone down, and scroll by tapping the surface next to your phone! This prevents nasty fingerprints getting all over your screen while still maintaining usability!

📐 How we built it

We built a prototype of this app in the web using HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript and the Generic Sensor API. It uses the phone's Accelerometer on the Z axis. This allowed us to quickly make the app cross platform, however for a production release, we would need to write separate code for both IOS and Android, utilizing the Accessibility API to make it work.

🎬 Challenges we ran into

Our team had very limited time, which forced us to think outside the box when coming up with ways to demo our idea.

🏆 Accomplishments that we're proud of

When the application finally worked it was a great feeling. We demoed it to our families and they all enjoyed playing with it.

📘 What we learned

We learned that sensors are surprisingly accurate and precise. This forced us to refine our detection logic and spend more time parsing the data.

⏭️ What's next for TapScroll

We will be implementing the application for both Android and IOS and refining our tap detection code to make the app easier to use. Additionally we will be adding more settings such as custom functions based on tap profiles.