Inspiration 👓
The inspiration for this project stems from the challenges of meeting many new people at once and struggling to remember names, conversations, and hobbies. For students like us first-year university students, this is common during events like frosh week, while for adults, it may occur when transitioning to a new job. The project is also designed with older adults in mind, such as all our grandparents, who may experience memory difficulties. It aims to assist them in _recalling names, past interactions, and personal interests of those they meet, making social interactions easier and more meaningful. The inspiration behind the project is for people of every age, from young university students to wise old grandparents that people have!
What it does 🤖
Our hack utilizes OpenCV and mediapipe to recognize faces of new friends and acquaintances. No more struggling to remember names or hobbies—our system displays each person’s name and key information right next to their face, making it easier to connect and engage with others. Additionally, we used the Cohere to summarize conversations, generate keywords, and extract names, helping you recall important details about each person in the future.
How we built it 🏗️
We built a real-time facial detection system using OpenCV and MediaPipe for video input, paired with PyAudio for synchronized audio recording. MongoDB stores captured images and metadata. This project is designed for head tracking, face recognition, and efficient multimedia data storage and retrieval in real-time applications.
Challenges we ran into 🎯
Initially, we've had way too many ideas, however, we ended up scraping off every single idea we could think of for the first night because they were either hard to accomplish, or we thought they weren't good enough. And it was frustrating not being able to think through and finally pin down on a single clear idea we could work towards. And especially since this is the first time at a hackathon for most of us, there are a lot of things we still didn't know, and had to chat with mentors and volunteers for advice, but as we kept trying, we started picking up the learning curve even more, despite many challenges we're still facing, the experience is all worth it.
Accomplishments that we're proud of 🥇
For us, as most of us are first time hackers, we were proud of making tiny little progress through every hour of the hackathon, powering through every single stepback and challenge by working and collaborating together to solve that one little bug in our code. Especially since it's the first hackathon most of us have attended, we're proud of the fact that we were willing to put ourselves out of our comfort zone, to learn, grow, meet new people and immerse ourselves in the technology world, from tiny steps, to giant leaps.
What we learned 💡
Thug it out. Typing this at 5:30 really shows us what it means to successfully finish a hackathon with a working project. From learning OpenCV's library to MongoDB's Pymongo all the way to just trying to integrate an audio and video file at the same time in Visual Studio; it was quite an experience for all of us, an unforgettable one we must add.
What's next for IntroSpectacle 🔮
Our mission for IntroSpectacle is to develop it into something useful and applicable in real life. By converting this webcam to a smaller and sleeker device we want to improve the look as well as the features of the product. A large part of our inspiration started from the challenges of not being able to remember things about people, and with different and new features we will be able to take off!
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.