Inspiration
“ I do think that a significant portion of the population of developed countries, and eventually all countries, will have AR experiences every day, almost like eating three meals a day. It will become that much a part of you” ~ Tim Cook, CEO, Apple at a technical conference in Utah
The beauty of AR with its camera-based object recognition is that the whole world becomes the interface to this data: just look at something to receive more information, and it can work on most of the smart-phones without major hardware requirements unlike VR (Virtual Reality).
However, most of the existing AR solutions are:
- Discrete (targeting a specific user group)
- Solve very specific problems
- Work only with predefined Image targets
- Proprietary
Would you prefer using 15 different task-specific search services for daily use over using just Google? No, right? That's what we intend to do with AR as well!
What it does
VisionAR turns your native camera into a search engine overlaying relevant rich information right to your screen in realtime. It continuously scans your camera stream and comes up with the most relevant explanation for the feed in your native language.
Our solution can also be further extended to specific use cases like identifying calorie counts, purchasing the projects you see on the go from e-commerce platforms, and much more. We also extended our hack to identify the bus and show details like the Destination, expected arrival, weather, promotions, etc on the screen.
Technologies used
Unity3D, Python, Google custom search API, DuckDuckGo instant answers API, Google Cloud Vision, Heroku, and Wolfram Alpha
Challenges we ran into
This was our first attempt of building something with unity and we ran into few bugs which took us quite some time to debug and fix.
What we learned
- It's much convenient to develop hack with your familiar tech stack (but less fun)
- That AR is awesome!
What's next for visionAR
We plan to make this project Open Source so that it can be a community driven project which benefits the entire tech community and can be designed further by taking into account the aggregated opinions of the community.
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