Arc'Tag

💡Inspiration

Outdoor exploration can be healing, empowering, and community-building, but it’s often expensive or inaccessible, especially for people who don’t own the right gear. We wanted to solve that.

Arc'Tag was inspired by the idea of making outdoor gear more shareable, local, and sustainable. By using NFC tags and a compatible mobile app, we set out to build a tool that helps people donate and borrow outdoor gear in their communities, without needing lockers, shipping, or complex systems. Just a tap.

🤖What it does

Arc'Tag is a mobile app that uses NFC tags to power peer-to-peer gear sharing. Here's how it works:

Donate gear to the shared pool (like a backpack, jacket, or sleeping bag).
Attach an NFC tag (about $0.30) to the gear and scan it into the app.
The gear becomes available on the map, gear list, and your profile for others to reserve and borrow.
After connecting with the current owner, borrowers scan the NFC tag to check out the gear. The item is now listed under your profile--at your location!
When you're finished, scan again to return the gear.
Users earn points for lending or borrowing gear.
The more points you earn, the higher you climb on your local leaderboard!
Users can upload photos of the gear directly to the app, allowing other users to see the quality of the item

🛠️How we built it

We built Arc'Tag using:

SwiftUI for our iOS app interface
MapKit for showing available gear on a community map
Supabase for storing user and gear data + authentication
Core NFC for scanning and writing to tags
Figma to plan and design the UX/UI

🥊Challenges we ran into

Implementing a large full-stack app with complex views/interactions, data persistence, and NFC read/write functionality
Dealing with XCode and its quirks
Testing with NFC tags to ensure consistency
Managing connections and optimizing queries was tough.
Translating our designs into actual screens was a challenge. With so many views to implement, the transition from Figma to code wasn’t as smooth as we’d hoped.

✅ Accomplishments that we're proud of

Built a fully working app that reads/writes real NFC tags
Tackled several bugs with data persistence and managing states
Created a clean UX/UI flow from that accommodates all users needs
Designed a full point system and leaderboard experience
Made something low-cost and scalable for real-world community use

🌱What we learned

Arc'Tag taught us so much over these past 24 hours. NFC tags were completely new to us, and we were excited to explore both their incredible capabilities and their limitations. We discovered that tech is most exciting when it feels invisible—there’s something magical about tapping a tag and instantly checking gear in or out.

We also learned how complex Swift integrations can be, and that the best approach is to start simple and build up. Finally, we gained hands-on experience with database integration, which felt tricky at first but became much more manageable once we got the hang of it.

🔮What's next for Arc'Tag

Borrowing reminders and gear return nudges with push notifications
Enhanced security with user verification
Reviews and comments for shared items
In-app messaging system to maintain connections and streamline the checkout process
Manager dashboard for outdoor organizations to track inventory or make straight from the warehouse donations to the pool
Android version so more communities can join in
Leaderboard/point challenges and team events