Last weekend I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the final MLH Prime event in the beautiful Bloomberg London office. One thing I do need to give immediate kudos for is for having the coolest wristbands at any hackathon I’ve been to; I’m a sucker for fabric bands.
For Prime we wanted to take a more business-focused approach for our hack, incorporating practicality with extensibility. Looking to use AR as a form of disruptive tech, we came up with a few concepts ranging from map assistants to projectable keyboards. However, we settled on the idea of augmented reality business c…ar…ds. One day I will work on an AR project without punning up the title, one day…
The app
A company has a custom card printed that will be used for every employee. Each card has a small section with a unique ID (our demonstration used names, in practice this would be a randomly generated string of characters) that can be entered into a secret login page.
What I love about this is the idea of these cards being a mini secret portal into a querying database; something about that concept brings out the RPG gamer in me I suppose.
Once an ID has been entered into the top secret command console terminal portal, users will pop up with a fancy animation around them.
We originally planned to have an online admin panel for business owners to add employees; we’d then send a request to the database we’d be checking (Bloomberg in this case) along with the user ID, the information would then be returned to us in JSON. But as with many hackathons, those 24 hours are tough to manage. I cheated a little and created a user class that holds the data of their card in public fields and tied it up with a few empty game objects in unity.
I request that you don’t look at the GitHub repository above; hindsight is a powerful trait that was not present in the late hours of the event.
Being part of MLH Prime was a blast; we made something relatively polished, saw some incredible hacks and most importantly, got two free t-shirts to meet so many new and interesting people.
Oh, and the unlimited free blueberry drinks were great too.
Join me next week where I attend DesperatelyInNeedOfAHaircutHack.