Donation Visualizer

The project logo
A donation of one dollar buys one N95 mask
10 dollars buys 14 N95 masks
A close up of the masks

Inspiration

During this pandemic, we see all the wonderful opportunities to donate to a COVID-19 relief fund. But what are these donations being used for? The most common answer is PPE - Personal Protective Equipment, namely, N95 masks.

What it does

Donation Visualizer is an Augmented Reality Instagram effect that showcases how many N95 masks a specific donation amount ($1, $10, $25, $50) can buy. It shows the life-sized masks piling up virtually in real space!

How we built it

The first step was to calculate the cost of an N95 mask, which varies by region, and the pandemic causes prices to fluctuate based on supply and demand. We assume that charities will buy in bulk to save money, so we found the cost of a large pack of N95 masks, and divided that by the quantity of masks in the pack. This gave us an average cost of $0.71 per mask. Then, we 3D modelled the masks in Blender and animated them using a rigid body simulation so the masks fall as they would in real life. We baked the animations and exported them as .fbx files. Lastly, we imported the .fbx files into SparkAR and used the Native UI slider to toggle the animation, visibility, and added 2D stickers showcasing the dollar amounts in the top right corner.

Challenges we ran into

The textures on the mask in blender were not importing properly into SparkAR, so we had to make the materials in SparkAR. In addition, the slider was a learning curve and we are happy to have gotten it to work.