Facepie

Inspiration

In the past few years, AR has revolutionized the world, but still doesn't feel like it's at it's full potential of connecting people. We wanted to innovate and create a newer category of AR in which two people can interact through AR. Although our application is a pie game, we wanted to prove that AR could so that two people across the world can interact with each other.

What it does

Our application currently is essentially a pie throwing game where one player throws and pie and another player has to dodge the pies.

How we built it

We built our application with SparkAR.

Challenges we ran into

We started the hackathon by creating our own video call platform which worked great and put us on a good start, but, after conversation with the engineers at Facebook, we were encouraged to avoid doing that integration with our given time. We figured that SparkAR would work similarly to PoseNet which interprets frames of a video and returns points of the body and wanted to leverage that by putting a canvas over our video call platform to create a truly interactive experience, but we were reasonably dettered from this idea a few hours in. We made a huge pivot at this point to just making our application run on one screen since we were strapped for time at this point. This is where we bumped into more challenges, we're all very used to scripting for programming and SparkAR felt strange to us; there was definitely a learning curve and we didn't know how to do alot of the things we wanted to do on the visual UI. We thought we SparkAR had an optional importable package that we could work off, but we couldn't find it so we struggled to complete a lot of the features we wanted to implement.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• We started off really strong, we created a video call platform similar to skype in the first thirty minutes, which was bittersweet because we had to scrap it after
• We kinda have a working application?

What we learned

• Definitely do ALOT of research on a technology beforehand. We had no idea how to use SparkAR and found it to be harder to read and less intuitive because we were just used to writing code as opposed to using a UI. We even thought of scrapping our SparkAR idea the last hour in and swapping to Messenger because we had no idea what was going on with SparkAR.
• You can't export SparkAR into code, we wasted 3 hours on an idea because we hinged converting our SparkAR file into React afterwards and putting everything together.

What's next for Facepie

We want to create an interactive AR experience where two people can interact with each other regardless of the physical distance between them. Our next step is figuring out how to integrate AR with our video chat app. We know that this idea has a ton of potential and, while our proposed implementation of it isn't the most helpful, we know that it is the right step forward for AR.

Built With

• sparkar