Inspiration
Most of the time, weather is either mundane or disappointing. We open our weather apps and hope for a miracle, either a warm day in January, or a cool wind in august. But days like that are few and far between. We wanted to add a little magic to the boring monotony of checking the weather, and make checking the weather a little more enjoyable.
We also drew inspiration from 2 primary places, people who live in dense urban cities, and snow snow globes. Many people in dense cities don’t have windows, or views beyond a brick wall next door. It hard to realize how much a bright window with dynamic weather can help someone's mood while living in a situation like this. Snowglobes can offer a fun perspective of familier city.
When the Weather Channel went viral for posting a video where a flood surrounding the reporter using augmented reality in order to give the viewer an idea of the size and depth of the flood, the world realized how powerful a tool AR could be while helping people imagine the weather.
As a side benefit, we built a way to transport the user away from inclimate weather, to see and experience better days in other parts of the world. On days that are cold and miserable in New York, transport yourself in augmented reality to sunny San Diego.
What it does
Our Weather Window enables users to have an immersive experience of the weather of any cities at any time. Users can get the information about the weather both visually through the AR built window view, and grasp the accurate data shown along the side. Besides, the slide bar underneath provide the smooth experience of exploring weather changes in a 24 hr range.
How we built it
It was mainly built with Unity 3D. We created a three layered scene, with photoshopped views of the city, an obj model of the empire state building, and a skybox. We added a particle system to simulate snow and rain. And we then placed all of these components into a portal, so that the scene was only visible while looking through a window. Finally, we made an API call from the "Open Weather Map" and connected to the components to visualize the real data over time in three different cities.
In ARkit, we also used the plane detection function to make sure that the window was always at eye level.
Challenges we ran into
Partly displaying scene throughout the frame was the big challenge. We approached making a transparent box to cover five sides and show the front.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Success in building multi-layer AR frame that shows elements within elements as well as applying physics between particles and elements in AR scene.
What we learned
How to share projects with Unity Colab and Github. How to write shaders.
What's next for Weather Window
The app built during the Hackathon is a prototype. We will definitely include more options for the cities. We would like to add a search function for selecting cities and adding the cities into a customized index. We will also make the scenes inside the window more dynamic and interesting. We will map the background skybox and 3d models of sun and moon with the real timeline to make the scenes look more accurate. We will also put some birds flying around for "sunny" and trees blown away for "windy".
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.