coronaVRus | Devpost

Inspiration

With everything going around in the world, caused by COVID-19. We all need to be taking extra safety precautions, especially when touching surfaces in which COVID-19 can live on. From living this way, we wanted to educate others through augmented reality informational cartoon viruses that explain a bit about the potential life of COVID-19 on that surface. Not only are people learning about where these potential threats are commonly found, but in the process, they are having fun playing our game! This is also a great encouragement for people to get up out of our seats and move around.

What it does

The goal of our app was to recognize the surface and display the correct virus and message. Although we don't have a complete app to show both components. We were able to create both parts, recognizing the surface and 3D cartoon viruses alongside messages. For example, we have viruses that live on cardboard, glass, wood, and metal surfaces, along with how long the virus lives on each type of surface. Our app is able to display each of the viruses and their message, even though it lacks the interaction with the user's surroundings, we were happy that it was able to be educational :)

How we built it

To create this project, we originally thought we were going to use AutoML Vision but with everyone having no experience, it proved to be a challenge. In the end, we decided to use Microsoft Azure to create the computer vision model. For the augmented reality, our team used a variety of CAD software, such a Solidworks and TinkerCAD. We ultimately uploaded them to echoAR.

Challenges we ran into

As most of the software was new, learning virtually was harder than we had thought. We all got stuck, trying to figure out how to overcome our obstacles. Not being able to sit right next to one another where you can talk to your teammates is not like before making this an amazing learning experience.

Accomplishments that we are proud of

After meeting only after the hackathon had started, we are proud of what we built and the idea behind it. With everything going around, every kid, adult and grandparent could definitely use a friendly reminder on what to disinfect and how long a certain surface takes to kill COVID-19.

What we learned

We learned a lot, especially since we had next to no experience beforehand. Over the course of this hackathon, we learnt how to set up a Google Cloud API and the basics of how to make an AR app.

What's next for coronaVRus

Like everything in the world, nothing is perfect. We had hoped to create a fully functioning app that fulfilled our project, however, we fell just short of that. But the learning experience was completely worth it, we hope to fix the last couple bugs in our app and get it live for other people to enjoy :)