RunRing

Inspiration

According to Time Magazine, only 28% of U.S. adults meet healthy benchmarks for physical activity. Most people know exercise matters but still aren’t motivated enough to do it.

Meet RunRing, an AR experience that transforms reality into a platform ring collection game to motivate you to run! We believe people will run more when running is fun.

What it does

RunRing generates rings along your running route that you can collect as you run, and tracks your score, providing constant dopamine hits as you work towards meeting your exercise quota. There’s also fun 3D creatures and nature spawned along your path to enhance your running experience and make it more visually pleasant.

How we built it

To build for Snap Spectacles, we used Lens Studio, and wrote custom Javascript scripts. We spawn rings onto the path ahead of the user, and enable their game score to be incremented as they collect more rings, rewarding them for being active. We utilize physics colliders to allow users to reach out and grab rings.

Challenges we ran into

Now, we definitely ran into our fair share of challenges during this hackathon. First and foremost, we were all completely new to AR and using Lens Studio, so we had to figure out how to implement basic functionalities like placing objects and scripting from scratch. Fortunately, with the help from the Snap studio mentors and online forum posts, we were able to make a really fun game that we’re all proud of.

One issue we weren’t able to fully resolve was dynamically spawning rings along the path while still getting them to work properly with other scripts we wanted to run on the rings, such as physics collisions.

We also ran into issues with Spectacles Interaction Kit and were unable to import it into our scripts to use its hand interaction features. To work around this, we attached physics colliders to the hands and the rings which allowed us to detect when the player’s hands hit them.

Finally, we weren’t able to get spectator mode to work which made it harder for us to look at what we had created from different angles.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

It was everyone’s very first time making an AR application and using 3D assets, which was both challenging and fun! We were all able to divide and conquer on the different functionalities we wanted to achieve, deep diving documentation and online resources to learn how to do anything with Lens Studio.

Also, we composed and produced our own game music! There's a calmer rendition for when the game starts, and a more exciting one for actual gameplay.

What we learned

AR is hARd.

We learned to use Lens Studio and how to integrate various 3D models into an AR application and make them interactable. We learned about what kinds of interactions are unique to AR and had fun thinking about ways to take advantage of those.

What's next for RunRing

We’d love to implement more features to take advantage of gamification, such as tracking high scores to encourage users to set higher goals, getting chased by some creature for more adrenaline, rewarding users for running longer by visually improving the environment or granting new features like pets that run alongside you as your score increases. It would also be cool to utilize a path segmentation model and dynamically generate rings along a known walkable path.