## Inspiration

Let's face it: Museums, parks, and exhibits need some work in this digital era. Why lean over to read a small plaque when you can get a summary and details by tagging exhibits with a portable device?
There is a solution for this of course: NFC tags are a fun modern technology, and they could be used to help people appreciate both modern and historic masterpieces. Also there's one on your chest right now!

## The Plan

Whenever a tour group, such as a student body, visits a museum, they can streamline their activities with our technology. When a member visits an exhibit, they can scan an NFC tag to get detailed information and receive a virtual collectible based on the artifact. The goal is to facilitate interaction amongst the museum patrons for collective appreciation of the culture. At any time, the members (or, as an option, group leaders only) will have access to a live slack feed of the interactions, keeping track of each other's whereabouts and learning.

## How it Works

When a user tags an exhibit with their device, the Android mobile app (built in Java) will send a request to the StdLib service (built in Node.js) that registers the action in our MongoDB database, and adds a public notification to the real-time feed on slack.

## The Hurdles and the Outcome

Our entire team was green to every technology we used, but our extensive experience and relentless dedication let us persevere. Along the way, we gained experience with deployment oriented web service development, and will put it towards our numerous future projects. Due to our work, we believe this technology could be a substantial improvement to the museum industry.

## Extensions

Our product can be easily tailored for ecotourism, business conferences, and even larger scale explorations (such as cities and campus). In addition, we are building extensions for geotags, collectibles, and information trading.
## Inspiration

Imagine a world where your best friend is standing in front of you, but you can't see them. Or you go to read a menu, but you are not able to because the restaurant does not have specialized brail menus. For millions of visually impaired people around the world, those are not hypotheticals, they are facts of life.

Hollywood has largely solved this problem in entertainment. Audio descriptions allow the blind or visually impaired to follow the plot of movies easily. With Sight, we are trying to bring the power of audio description to everyday life.

## What it does

Sight is an app that allows the visually impaired to recognize their friends, get an idea of their surroundings, and have written text read aloud. The app also uses voice recognition to listen for speech commands to identify objects, people or to read text.

## How we built it

The front-end is a native iOS app written in Swift and Objective-C with XCode. We use Apple's native vision and speech API's to give the user intuitive control over the app.

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The back-end service is written in Go and is served with NGrok.

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We repurposed the Facebook tagging algorithm to recognize a user's friends. When the Sight app sees a face, it is automatically uploaded to the back-end service. The back-end then "posts" the picture to the user's Facebook privately. If any faces show up in the photo, Facebook's tagging algorithm suggests possibilities for who out of the user's friend group they might be. We scrape this data from Facebook to match names with faces in the original picture. If and when Sight recognizes a person as one of the user's friends, that friend's name is read aloud.

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We make use of the Google Vision API in three ways:

* To run sentiment analysis on people's faces, to get an idea of whether they are happy, sad, surprised etc.
* To run Optical Character Recognition on text in the real world which is then read aloud to the user.
* For label detection, to indentify objects and surroundings in the real world which the user can then query about.

## Challenges we ran into

There were a plethora of challenges we experienced over the course of the hackathon.

1. Each member of the team wrote their portion of the back-end service a language they were comfortable in. However when we came together, we decided that combining services written in different languages would be overly complicated, so we decided to rewrite the entire back-end in Go.
2. When we rewrote portions of the back-end in Go, this gave us a massive performance boost. However, this turned out to be both a curse and a blessing. Because of the limitation of how quickly we are able to upload images to Facebook, we had to add a workaround to ensure that we do not check for tag suggestions before the photo has been uploaded.
3. When the Optical Character Recognition service was prototyped in Python on Google App Engine, it became mysteriously rate-limited by the Google Vision API. Re-generating API keys proved to no avail, and ultimately we overcame this by rewriting the service in Go.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

Each member of the team came to this hackathon with a very disjoint set of skills and ideas, so we are really glad about how well we were able to build an elegant and put together app.

Facebook does not have an official algorithm for letting apps use their facial recognition service, so we are proud of the workaround we figured out that allowed us to use Facebook's powerful facial recognition software.

We are also proud of how fast the Go back-end runs, but more than anything, we are proud of building a really awesome app.

## What we learned

Najm taught himself Go over the course of the weekend, which he had no experience with before coming to YHack.

Nathaniel and Liang learned about the Google Vision API, and how to use it for OCR, facial detection, and facial emotion analysis.

Zak learned about building a native iOS app that communicates with a data-rich APIs.

We also learned about making clever use of Facebook's API to make use of their powerful facial recognition service.

Over the course of the weekend, we encountered more problems and bugs than we'd probably like to admit. Most of all we learned a ton of valuable problem-solving skills while we worked together to overcome these challenges.

## What's next for Sight

If Facebook ever decides to add an API that allows facial recognition, we think that would allow for even more powerful friend recognition functionality in our app.

Ultimately, we plan to host the back-end on Google App Engine.
## Inspiration

I dreamed about the day we would use vaccine passports to travel long before the mRNA vaccines even reached clinical trials. I was just another individual, fortunate enough to experience stability during an unstable time, having a home to feel safe in during this scary time. It was only when I started to think deeper about the effects of travel, or rather the lack thereof, that I remembered the children I encountered in Thailand and Myanmar who relied on tourists to earn $1 USD a day from selling handmade bracelets. 1 in 10 jobs are supported by the tourism industry, providing livelihoods for many millions of people in both developing and developed economies. COVID has cost global tourism $1.2 trillion USD and this number will continue to rise the longer people are apprehensive about travelling due to safety concerns. Although this project is far from perfect, it attempts to tackle vaccine passports in a universal manner in hopes of buying us time to mitigate tragic repercussions caused by the pandemic.

## What it does

* You can login with your email, and generate a personalised interface with yours and your family’s (or whoever you’re travelling with’s) vaccine data
* Universally Generated QR Code after the input of information
* To do list prior to travel to increase comfort and organisation
* Travel itinerary and calendar synced onto the app
* Country-specific COVID related information (quarantine measures, mask mandates etc.) all consolidated in one destination
* Tourism section with activities to do in a city

## How we built it

Project was built using Google QR-code APIs and Glideapps.

## Challenges we ran into

I first proposed this idea to my first team, and it was very well received. I was excited for the project, however little did I know, many individuals would leave for a multitude of reasons. This was not the experience I envisioned when I signed up for my first hackathon as I had minimal knowledge of coding and volunteered to work mostly on the pitching aspect of the project. However, flying solo was incredibly rewarding and to visualise the final project containing all the features I wanted gave me lots of satisfaction. The list of challenges is long, ranging from time-crunching to figuring out how QR code APIs work but in the end, I learned an incredible amount with the help of Google.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

I am proud of the app I produced using Glideapps. Although I was unable to include more intricate features to the app as I had hoped, I believe that the execution was solid and I’m proud of the purpose my application held and conveyed.

## What we learned

I learned that a trio of resilience, working hard and working smart will get you to places you never thought you could reach. Challenging yourself and continuing to put one foot in front of the other during the most adverse times will definitely show you what you’re made of and what you’re capable of achieving. This is definitely the first of many Hackathons I hope to attend and I’m thankful for all the technical as well as soft skills I have acquired from this experience.

## What's next for FlightBAE

Utilising GeoTab or other geographical softwares to create a logistical approach in solving the distribution of Oyxgen in India as well as other pressing and unaddressed bottlenecks that exist within healthcare. I would also love to pursue a tech-related solution regarding vaccine inequity as it is a current reality for too many.