Bottle - Social Media

Inspiration

COVID-19 has restricted human interaction and social activities throughout the world. Most of us started to feel the need for a more immersive platform to create shared experiences. We wanted to make 'Bottle' to help people create and share memories by simultaneously engaging them in a physical activity in a safe and social distanced way.

We also wanted to make the idea in such a way that it would help the local communities in being together despite these tough times.

What it does

'Bottle' is a AR and geo-fencing powered social networking mobile app that provides a fun and safe way of creating shared experiences and memories by dropping or picking bottles. Each bottle contains a message along with an image/ video/ AR object.

Dropping bottles

You can drop a bottle (a message) in a particular location and share it with your friends. For example, you can drop a bottle at the super market which says about your favorite snack.

Picking bottles

You can pick a bottle by going to the particular location on the map. Once you pick a bottle, you will be able to view the message that your friend has shared with you. For example, you can goto the super market where your friend has dropped a bottle to find out the message that he has left for you.

How we built it

We built a mobile application using Flutter. The app is configured to work both on Android and iOS platforms. We used google maps for integrating the map in the homescreen. We made use of ARCore for implementing the Augumented Reality part.

All the functionalities are covered in the YouTube video which can be found above. But, since we had to stick to the time restrictions, we added information about Augumented reality here:

Note : the above gif is not the actual working of our application - it is just a visualization to show you how the AR part works. Since ARKit only supports iOS - we are unable to present it. Please checkout the video for other working features.

It is possible to share an image/ video or an AR object along with a bottle message. As shown in the above GIF, you can select any 3D object and send it as an AR bottle message. The user will be able to view the AR image when he picks up the bottle. We are very thankful to ARCore for helping us in implementing Augumented Reality inside our Flutter application.

Challenges we ran into

• Integrating geo-fencing was a bit challenging. It took us remarkable amount of time to finish the maps.
• Setting the custom 'bottle' marker took us a lot of time. We had to spend alot of time on stackoverflow.
• ARCore was a challenging task.
• Calculating the distance between two users and displaying it on 'users nearby' was a tedious task.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• This is one of the most technically complex projects which we've worked on. We wrote 7000+ lines of code in 36 hours and we're super happy with the outcome of our application.
• We're proud of making a successful submission at hello:world.
• We're happy about making an 'out of the box' social networking app which is unique and first of its kind.

What we learned

• We learnt to use geo-fencing and geo-coding in Flutter.
• We tried using AR Core for the first time. We learnt the basics of using AR in Flutter.
• Using firestore to store the real time user locations.
• Finding the distance between the location of two users.
• Time management.
• Teamwork.

What's next for Bottle - Social Media

• Fixing bugs and making the application production ready.
• Deploying it to Google Play Store and App store.
• Polishing the UI and trying to make a better UX.

Built With

• ar-core
• augumented-reality
• dart
• firestore
• flutter
• google-maps
• material-ui
• stackoverflow