Inspiration
Our inspiration came from the urgent need of community based knowledge of plants for both agricultural purpose and medicinal/drug discovery purposes. With Alabama being one of the most biodiverse states in the country, we thought this was an important market to help innovate. HudsonAlpha is home to the best sequencing access in the world and now one of the nicest Greenhouses making community outreach so important for local Alabama residents. We want to see the change this multi-billion dollar industry has to offer and that starts with bringing awareness to resources that are already available and to inspire the next generation to be more engaged with plant biology.
What it does
BotanicalAR engages the community by displaying 3D interactive models of both plants and soil specimens in the effort to highlight the current research going on in the HudsonAlpha Greenhouse and storing data metrics/demographics for people that are visiting the HudsonAlpha campus.
How we built it
We built the AR interface with SWIFT using ARKit, RealityKit, SwiftUI, and FocusEntity libraries. We built the 3d models using tinkercad and taking royalty free 3D models off of Apple's website. Lastly, we made the server using MySQL and used this to communicate the demographics of each person using our app.
Challenges we ran into
Finding the right software suite to implement an AR experience where we could directly download to our phones was a little harder than expected.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
An accomplishment we have is the ability to use AR technology to create a plant/rock sample that is able to be mapped on x,y, and z axis that has spatial recognition to identify flat surfaces.
What we learned
We learned how to use Swift and MySQL in tandem and the different libraries available for programming an AR application.
What's next for Botanical AR
The next step for Botanical AR is using our application and improving it. Adding a more put together UI, making it more curated towards the community.
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