Project:Hack 19 - StepTrackAR

In June I attended Project:Hack 19, one of a series of hackathons ran by Projecting Success. I'm only just getting around to writing up a short summary.

Venue

This hackathon was held at the amazing venue of Manchester City's football stadium The Etihad. It takes a lot more effort to run a hackathon than people realise, the Projecting Success team have got it down to an art.

Team & Project

Our small team of 3 quickly came together quickly and decided we wanted to tackle a given challenge of improving an existing step tracking app.

Being the main technical lead on the team, I laid my cards on the table.

"Look, I can build a rubbish looking native mobile app (not my area of expertise) that looks like ever other step tracking app, or I can make a pretty unique, cool looking Augmented Reality proof of concept".

So we decided to stretch the brief and create a proof of concept of an augmented reality step tracker. It had 3 animated views that could be switched between (see demo video).

I came up with the name Step TrackAR which I thought was a nice play on words, and it helped that the domain name was free, so I registered that for ￡7. The domain is currently redirecting to the demo video. See for yourself StepTrackar.com

Daily step count (bars), Tree view (how many trees had been earned & planted), and Walk terrain map, showing 3D terrain with the path walked overlaid.

Demo Video

Summary

It looks like our risk of trying something new and innovative paid off and inspired the judges, as we were notified a few weeks later that we came 2nd in the event.

See the (fast forwarded) video below to see the announcement.

I want to thank the organisers for putting on a great event at a fantastic venue , the sponsors, judges and my team mates for trusting me to do something new. It was a risk, but it paid off.

Take small risks!

Until next time!

-- Lee