Pursuit of Opportunity: Pioneer September 2018
I found this on College Opportunity and decided to apply for it along with 2 good friends (Arpith S and Amith Shiv). From what I saw, this certainly looked attractive!
In short, the program was this:
- Submit your idea — can be from any domain and any kind.
- Submit weekly reports of your progress in developing it.
- Also, review other ideas and progress and vote for the successful ones.
- Keep this going for about a month.
So I decided to implement an idea that I got during my vacation.
The idea
This thought bubble struck me when I went into a restaurant and ordered excess food by mistake only because we did not understand what we agreed to while placing the order.
At restaurants, when we look at the menu and try to decide the order, many a times we tend to make the decision with very little idea of the quantity and appearance of the item. This, in turn, results in a miscalculation and we place the order for excess food. So when it arrives and we start diving deep into the meal, we realize the mistake. So what do we do? Most of the time, one of the following:
- Pack the remaining food and take it home. Though at first this may seem as a neat solution, I personally feel consuming such food item after a few hours will tend to loose its quality.
- Eat the remaining, even if it means stuffing the stomach (cause we strongly believe that wasting food is bad). In the long run this deteriorates the body well being and can be the cause for obesity.
- Leave the food behind. This clearly is bad and undesirable as we spend money for food that we did not consume entirely.
Even when we order food online, customers are left to see picture-perfect, mouth watering images of the delight with very little sense of quantity. Thus when the food arrives, the problem previously mentioned persists. So what is the solution? How can we provide a sense of quantity to the consumer much before cooking it at the kitchen? How to stop food wastage?
My solution was to use Augmented Reality: AR FoodSaver. We have an app that renders the 3 dimensional equivalent of the food item we wished to consume, hovered on a table through the phone’s display. The user can view the animated food item from all possible angles to get a true sense of quantity and appearance thus better decide the quantity while placing the order. This can result in significant reduction in food wastage. The idea may seem quite straight-forward but something about this left me feeling a great potential was yet to be unlocked in this industry. What if more health analysis features to estimate and see food which better impacts the body? Extensions that analyze and help you try new cuisines that are close to your taste based on past experiences? Well, I admit it is a small idea, but pitching this in Pioneer seemed worthwhile.
I spoke about this idea to Tino, the AR Developer from Hacktory Hackathon experience. He appreciated my thought process but felt the idea did not have the potential to scale and suggested I tried to pull these ideas to other domains. This did not discourage me, but helped me think from a new perspective. How would it scale? Well, it would only if I started, and so decided to apply for the Pioneer Tournament.
Begin
Arpith and Amith, my college friends agreed to join hands to try out this project. Amith always wanted to do something cool with AR while Arpith was ready to explore a new terrain. We filled the form. Initially they asked us a lot of interesting questions, few of them are:
- What would your friends say makes you interesting?
- Who is someone you personally know that will have an incredible impact on the world one day?
- What is a group or organization that you left or were kicked out of? Why?
- Who is a public figure you think you’re most like? Why?
- What do you want to get out of Pioneer?
and much more.
This experience was great! I tried to fill it to the best of our knowledge, and then decided to get to work. As the week came to an end, we had to submit our progress report and vote for other’s ideas.
Week 1
At the end of week 1, we received this mail:
We were thrilled to see people like the idea. This encouraged us to try better and work towards the idea.
This week we extensively researched how augmented reality works, the software used for it and how the process works. We realized that it mainly involves creating the 3D render of the food, then using Unity to bring it into Augmented reality.
We decided that step one was to learn and understand how to get started in AR Development. We explored the internet and realized that Unity was essential to get started. Friends suggested that Google’s ARCore would help us in making a better product. So we split up and tried different trajectories to see which one best suited the task.
Week 2
Though our rank sank, we spent this week and tried to improve.
We were facing difficulty in learning the skill required. My phone was not compatible with ARCore and so hit a dead end at that point. As my team members were busy learning on their trajectories, I decided to chart out a plan of execution. We had to make a list of potential restaurants ready to try out our product.
But then came the question — how to create the renders? Arpith suggested we automated the process by asking the restaurant to take 2D pictures from various angles and process it to render at 3D equivalent (like Autodesk Maya). We were yet to figure that out.
Week 3
Terrific improvement! We were happy to see people were pleased to see our progress.Unfortunately, we were busy this week and could not put in significant effort.
Thankfully though, Sijo helped me out after seeing my progress video! Thank you!
We look forward to potential collaboration with their product focusing on making the art of cooking greater again.
Week 4
Well, we stopped working on this and I plan to keep it aside due to multiple projects at the moment. This is the last video I made for the event.
End
Verdict
Well, we did not get selected, rightfully so. This is because we clearly gave up half way through. I spent more time in planning that working and that resulted in less action and more words — an undesirable fact.
Well, Pioneer was an excellent experience. I got to see what others were up to and this provided me connectivity with the minds round the world, ranging from the most sought after USA to the enlightened minds of Nigeria. Reading their passion and will to make a significant impact through their actions proved to me that humankind still strives to become pioneers of the decade.
Out of respect of those who shared their idea during the competition, I will not be disclosing their ideas but I can confidently say that of the 1000 or so ideas that were applied, most of those had a purpose and a mission to strive for and that is truly commendable. I would highly recommend everyone with an idea in mind to apply for this tournament as the voting and the positive feedback will help you in developing the idea into a better version and get closer to converting your idea into a reality.
And even if you do not win, Pioneer Tournament provides the environment to work and strive to provide good results weekly, the key fundamental concept behind #TWTW.
Thank you for reading my experience. I look forward to seeing more participate in Pioneer Tournament in the future!
