Passion Project
Lextech Hackathon Winners
Lextech Hackathon Winners
Practical AR
This was a hackathon to explore what’s possible with augmented reality. Each team had 1 week to
do whatever they could come up in their spare time. The rubric for determining a winner was
pretty simple: Each team would be graded on a 1 - 5 scale in the following
categories: Presentation, Concept, Technology, Design, Quality, and Completeness.
On our team we really wanted to find a practical use for AR that would have impact across a wide range of
industries and use cases.
View from an iPad in camera mode scanning the app clip on a laptop
MoAR engaging meetings
We formed a team of 4 and after beating around a bunch of ideas, settled on a use case around using AR to
create more engaging meetings. My role as designer was to supply all the design assets needed
for the two devs to create a working AR prototype. Our idea was to make the process as
lightweight as possible for viewers: we’d create an app clip code that could be displayed in a
meeting, then meeting participants could use their iPhones to scan the code and get the app clip, and then
see the AR content without needing to download an app.
Proof of concept
Devs worked furiously to get a working PoC completed while I used Blender, Reality Converter, and Reality
Composer to create the scenes for them. The scene was composed of multiple maps, each one had
different size bar charts sitting on top and different year tags. The concept was that you
could visualize sales or some other data and make the presentation of the data more engaging by allowing
meeting participants to explore it themselves visually. This is a screenshot from the working
prototype.
Multiple maps with yearly sales data viewable in AR
Presentation
WInning a hackathon is sometimes less about the technology, and more about the
presentation. Understanding how AR could create a more engaging meeting was a unique concept so
I focused the majority of my time on creating a teaser video to get people excited about it.
Its all about the presentation baby
Final Video
The PoC worked and was cool, but I’m most proud of the final teaser video I created using Blender, after
only having spent a week learning it. There’s a few artifacts I didn’t have time to fix and some of the
camera motion paths were a little jerky, but overall I thought it came out really nice. And the
judges must have thought so to because our team won! W00T!
