Touchless Camera

Inspiration

In the past, we've found that taking group pictures is often cumbersome and difficult to do; it takes a lot of tries to get a decent one and it can be tricky to run back and forth to click the button and take the picture. Our HackTJ project is aimed to aid that by giving a low-cost way for users to take photos without having to be right next to their devices.

In addition to that, we wanted to create a project involving computer vision because we were inspired by the technology used to identify different objects such as hand gestures or facial features, and we wanted to see what we could do with this technology.

What it does

This website takes pictures of a person and their friends a short time after they do a certain hand gesture (a closed fist). In addition to that, there is a setting to set the amount of time to wait until the camera takes the photo.

How we built it

We used Express.js for the backend and HTML/CSS/JS for the frontend. We used Haar Cascades in OpenCV.js to detect the closed fist.

Challenges we ran into

Some of us did not know some of the languages in our tech stack beforehand and had to learn it all during the competition.

In addition to that, we ran into some issues with screenshotting to save the image. We found that some of the elements that we used didn't integrate well with our screenshotting technology and needed to work around those limitations.

However, we got through it all and came out with our project!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of each learning a lot about different technologies. We also tried out a variety of things, from web development to computer vision, and we couldn't be happier with the result.

What we learned

We learned HTML, CSS, Node.js, and Javascript. We also learned lots about OpenCV.js; it was a bit trickier to use OpenCV in a different language than we were accustomed to (Python) but it definitely taught us a lot.

In addition to that, we learned the importance of planning ahead. We ended up changing our stack during the competition and doing that slowed down our progress; in the future, we will plan ahead better before starting to build our project.