designAR

Inspiration

We’re proud to be SCS students. But let’s be real. SCS students have a reputation of being a little lacking in terms of fashion. During the first week of fall semester, the outfit of the day was the Google shirt paired with Costco sweatpants or washed out jeans. We’re better than this. We need to be better than this. We have coding skills (and only coding skills), so why don’t we use them?

On a more serious note, clean water and access to clean water is a significant issue. We recently learned that water waste produced by clothing production is incredibly high. According to National Geographic, a single cotton shirt takes about 2700 liters of water to produce; this is enough to keep a person hydrated for more than two years. So the question we wanted to answer is: how do we minimize the amount of clothing that a person buys and wastes?

What it does

designAR is a smart mirror. The interface allows you to pick the occasion you're trying to dress for, such as an interview, school, or a date, and designAR will suggest outfits made from clothes in your closet. These outfits will appear on your body using augmented reality, so you can see exactly what it would look like on you without even having to try it on.

How we built it

We used Unity and Xcode to build our application. The augmented reality feature was implemented using ARKit for iOS. We developed a skeleton to be projected onto people, and rigged different articles of clothing to the skeleton. The skeleton moves with the person so they can see the outfit from different angles.

Challenges we ran into

A challenge we ran into was figuring out how to switch between different outfits. We wanted to make this feature as hands-free as possible. We imagined the user would either swipe or clap their hands, but soon realized the skeleton was not accurate enough to identify this motion consistently. Therefore, we switched to a timer based system, which essentially works the same.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

For most members of our group, TartanHacks was our first hackathon, so we are proud to have developed a working prototype that we believe is innovative and exciting. Augmented reality is becoming more popular, and we are proud that we created an application using it.

What we learned

Coffee makes us jittery. Never dance on a table when you’re sleep deprived (or ever for that matter). And pad thai is good, really good. But most importantly, we learned to solve problems, be patient, and work efficiently and effectively as a team.

What's next for designAR

In the future, we hope to expand our prototype of an iPhone app to an actual magic mirror with an interface similar to the app. Once the number of users increases, designAR would function similar to a social media platform where people can share their clothing tastes and keep up with trends. This will allow us to keep track of user data to suggest outfits for other users to buy based on their tastes.