Under the coding hood: HackForTomorrow 2019
Idea: ARomapp — Augmenting your cravings
HackForTomorrow is the annual hackathon organized as part of Excel 2019. I decided to attend the same with the team (Rawn, Shawn, Nihal, Jagath and myself) for ARomapp — augmenting your cravings.
The write up explains how we proceeded in the weekend — our wins and failures and the final result. I hope you gain from this experience and feel inspired to go for a hackathon as well.
So Rawn, Shawn and I had pitched this idea for iBeTo 2019 and we saw this hackathon as a chance to come together and work on the project. A few weeks prior to the hackathon, I met Jagath Jijo and befriended him. I also learned that he is interested in game development and so I invited him to be our team member for this project (to which he said yes!).
Before the hackathon, we decided on the following points:
- Photogrammetry will help us take measurement of objects we scan, thus 3D renders.
- Unity application can create Augmented Reality renders thus making our menu card scanner application.
- We can consider using Blender to create 3D renders of food items but at the cost of realism.
We knew we had a competition in the market already — KABAQ. This is a wonderful product where users get to see hyper realistic food items that are appetizing.
We instead are trying to focus on reducing food wastage by ensuring users are mindful of the quantity they wish to consume. Additionally, incase wastage occurs, we try to learn from the same and suggest lesser quantity in the future.
Anyhow, Jagath and I arrived at KTIZ, Kalamassery around 9 AM. Participants were slowly coming in and we were interacting with new folks.
Aashik Hameed presented his keynote session, explaining how maintaining an exploratory mindset enabled him to discover and experience new opportunities that shaped his career for the better. He went on to talk about what we should focus in this hackathon and how to maximize our team learning together.
The hackathon commenced at 11 AM. When our team came together, we split the work as follows:
- Rawn and Shawn work on the AR menu card.
- Jagath creates 3D Food renders using blender (learn from scratch)
- Nihal does an extensive market research.
- I look in to photogrammetry — computer vision techniques.
I spent most of the day experimenting and learning from this tutorial to see how Open CV could help me measure objects from image.
In between, Anshul came and interacted with his. He works in a startup within the same complex. He tried to help me debug my code and at 4 PM, took us for a game of table tennis.
Later that evening, I tried to interact with the rest of the teams. Jacob and squad from CET were working on a product that was an extension to Practo. I met Brian from FISAT who is passionate to explore possibilities in Natural Language Generation.
Closing midnight, we try to keep some fun events for students. I performed a magic trick using cards. I hope that was fun. Subsequently, Sharad Joe, Gopi Chetan and Aashik discussed about start up stories. The organizers did a great job of keeping the event eventful.
After making the presentation using Canva, I slept at 2 AM and woke up around 5.30 AM. Jagath decided to take a break from making impress.js presentations to watch a movie. After freshening up, I spent some more time interacting with peers.
We did not make much progress till 11 AM apart from apk creation of the AR App by the brothers (they went to hostel for the night) and presentation improvement.
After lunch, I represented the team and presented the idea to the jury panel. They seemed to be surprised that I had already reached out to a potential client (Donut Factory) to implement this product.
Results were announced later that day. Afnan and team from 2nd year CS, MEC finished 3rd for plastic management system. Jacob and team from 2nd year CS, CET finished 2nd. Christina and team from 3rd year EC, MEC finished 1st position for flood relief tool.
Overall, a good experience and decent progress in the project. I hope by the time of iBeTo finals (Excel in November) it will be ready. Cheers.
