ChemARstry

Deliver a chemistry lab to your home

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Inspiration

As stay at home order effective in Ontario again due to COVID-19. Students do not have the opportunities to go to school. We realized they are missing vital hands on experiences in school and labs. In addition, it is hard to focus during online school from our very own personal experience. This made us wondering if we can build something that could be fun and interesting apart from attending online class and reading textbook at home. Therefore, we decided to leverage augmented reality to build an interactive chemistry set to provide a refreshing and engaging experience for students.

What it does

In order to provide a fun and captivating educational experience, ChemArstry provides an intuitive and easy to use interface to immerse the students in augmented reality. Students will select from a collection of atoms/ elements that they can spawn in their home using their phones. The app let the students to create new compound by interacting with the atoms. Students could learn the basics of chemical compounds and how they are formed. Trust me, it is satisfying to see atoms bouncing at your home :)

How we built it

Tools we used:

  1. Unity
  2. ARCore
  3. Blender

Challenges we ran into

  • Online collaboration is tough especially when debugging and understand the code from each other.
    • Unity and augmented reality are completely new field for us, there are quite a bit of learning curve. Hence, we spent quite a large amount of time to debug and configure the project that could work smoothly.
  • Our development machine had a hard time to run and build Unity project. It takes a long time to test our application.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Despite the limitation of our hardware and difficulties of online collaboration, we are able deliver a product that we love to use.

What we learned

We learnt how to use Unity and learnt some of the fundamentals of augmented reality.

What's next for ChemARstry

  1. Multiplayer, families and roommate could do experiment in the same space (with social distancing)
  2. More elements and compound could be added in the application
  3. Add actual chemistry equipment such as bunsen burner, so that student could do different variety of experiments in the app.
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