Nova is a community based interactive storytelling experience. Each participant wears a wristband, called "stars", with LEDs, a small monitor, a speaker and a button. Users are given a color based identifier and a faction - red or blue which light up the LEDs with a brightness of 5. You can think of brightness as health or happiness, which you can gain and lose.

As you approach other users, the stars interact with each other. If the star is a member of the same faction, each user gets +2 brightness in their LEDs. If the star is a member of the opposing faction there are two options. First, the users can agree to make peace. Both users will walk away with +1 brightness. If one or both of the users doesn't agree to make peace, then they go into a challenge. The challenge is displayed on each of their monitors. Some examples are rock paper scissors, staring contest, or the person who can say "hello" in the most languages. After the two users complete the challenge, the winner presses the button. The winner receives 2 brightness and the loser has 2 brightness removed. If both users were to press that they won, they would each lose 3 brightness as a dishonesty penalty.

If your star goes out, it is re-spawned with the starting brightness of five, but the faction is now changed to the other team. The experience ends when all stars are of the same faction. Participants need to reconcile the desire to improve their own brightness and promote their faction with the knowledge that doing so aggressively will cause the entire game to end.

Part technical gadget, part artistic experience, we challenge our users to consider the purpose of their activities: by pushing for your personal or faction agenda, you can cause the whole game to shut down forever. By becoming the sole faction, have you "won the game"? Is this better than continuing to enjoy the experience Nova has brought to you along the way?

## Inspiration

We wanted to create a device which can demonstrate emotions and promote friendly interaction. We decided that each user would be a star, and since stars come from novae, our name was found.

## What it does

Nova communicates with the user through lights and sound. The modules communicate with each other through wireless connections to weave together a story that brings our users closer.

## How we built it

We built Nova using arduino, neopixels, NRF24L01 wireless modules and a small speaker. Ted worked on establishing the wireless connection while Joe made the LEDs shift to different modes to show emotion. Ashley created the form factor and created audio samples to match Joe's light patterns. Perri wrote the story of our project

## Challenges we ran into

We struggled to get the audio output to be high quality and also invoke the right emotions. Our wonderful mentors at Disney and iRobot helped to find solutions to get the audio to output properly, and Ashley listened to clips of films without speaking in order to emulate how sound mixers can convey a story without words.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of the story of our project and the ability to convey it with simple cuing. Our project uses almost no words or instructions and is usable out of the box.

## What we learned

We learned that you should not fall a victim to the planning fallacy (things always take longer than expected). Ted learned how to use the wireless modules Ashley learned how to believe(!) in herself.

## What's next for Nova

Next, we want to continue to develop the personality of our stars by adding more emotional responses. In particular we would like to add an IMU so we can detect different hand motions and perhaps verify winners of challenges. We also want to make a "confused" emotion where the LEDs color cycle and the star makes a whirring sound when you wave your arms around really fast. This will help users become more fond of and connected to their star.
## Inspiration

While we were doing preliminary research, we had found overwhelming amounts of evidence of mental health deterioration as a consequence of life-altering lockdown restrictions. Academic research has shown that adolescents depend on friendship to maintain a sense of self-worth and to manage anxiety and depression. Intimate exchanges and self-esteem support significantly increased long-term self worth and decreased depression.

While people do have virtual classes and social media, some still had trouble feeling close with anyone. This is because conventional forums and social media did not provide a safe space for conversation beyond the superficial. User research also revealed that friendships formed by physical proximity don't necessarily make people feel understood and resulted in feelings of loneliness anyway. Proximity friendships formed in virtual classes also felt shallow in the sense that it only lasted for the duration of the online class.

With this in mind, we wanted to create a platform that encouraged users to talk about their true feelings, and maximize the chance that the user would get heartfelt and intimate replies.

## What it does

Reach is an anonymous forum that is focused on providing a safe space for people to talk about their personal struggles. The anonymity encourages people to speak from the heart. Users can talk about their struggles and categorize them, making it easy for others in similar positions to find these posts and build a sense of closeness with the poster. People with similar struggles have a higher chance of truly understanding each other. Since ill-mannered users can exploit anonymity, there is a tone analyzer that will block posts and replies that contain mean-spirited content from being published while still letting posts of a venting nature through. There is also ReCAPTCHA to block bot spamming.

## How we built it

* Wireframing and Prototyping: Figma
* Backend: Java 11 with Spring Boot
* Database: PostgresSQL
* Frontend: Bootstrap
* External Integration: Recaptcha v3 and IBM Watson - Tone Analyzer
* Cloud: Heroku

## Challenges we ran into

We initially found it a bit difficult to come up with ideas for a solution to the problem of helping people communicate. A plan for a VR space for 'physical' chatting was also scrapped due to time constraints, as we didn't have enough time left to do it by the time we came up with the idea. We knew that forums were already common enough on the internet, so it took time to come up with a product strategy that differentiated us. (Also, time zone issues. The UXer is Australian. They took caffeine pills and still fell asleep.)

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

Finishing it on time, for starters. It felt like we had a bit of a scope problem at the start when deciding to make a functional forum with all these extra features, but I think we pulled it off. The UXer also iterated about 30 screens in total. The Figma file is *messy.*

## What we learned

As our first virtual hackathon, this has been a learning experience for remote collaborative work.
UXer: I feel like i've gotten better at speedrunning the UX process even quicker than before. It usually takes a while for me to get started on things. I'm also not quite familiar with code (I only know python), so watching the dev work and finding out what kind of things people can code was exciting to see.

# What's next for Reach

If this was a real project, we'd work on implementing VR features for those who missed certain physical spaces. We'd also try to work out improvements to moderation, and perhaps a voice chat for users who want to call.
## Inspiration

On the bus ride to another hackathon, one of our teammates was trying to get some sleep, but was having trouble because of how complex and loud the sound of people in the bus was. This led to the idea that in sufficiently noisy environment, hearing could be just as descriptive and rich as seeing. Therefore to better enable people with visual impairments to be able to navigate and understand their environment, we created a piece of software that is able to describe and create an auditory map of ones environment.

## What it does

In a sentence, it uses machine vision to give individuals a kind of echo location. More specifically, one simply needs to hold their cell phone up, and the software will work to guide them using a 3D auditory map. The video feed is streamed over to a server where our modified version of the yolo9000 classification convolutional neural network identifies and localizes the objects of interest within the image. It will then return the position and name of each object back to ones phone. It also uses the Watson IBM api to further augment its readings by validating what objects are actually in the scene, and whether or not they have been misclassified.

From here, we make it seem as though each object essentially says its own name, so that individual can essentially create a spacial map of their environment just through audio cues. The sounds get quieter the further away the objects are, and the ratio of sounds between the left and right are also varied as the object moves around the use. The phone are records its orientation, and remembers where past objects were for a few seconds afterwards, even if it is no longer seeing them.

However, we also thought about where in everyday life you would want extra detail, and one aspect that stood out to us was faces. Generally, people use specific details on and individual's face to recognize them, so using microsoft's face recognition api, we added a feature that will allow our system to identify and follow friend and family by name. All one has to do is set up their face as a recognizable face, and they are now their own identifiable feature in one's personal system.

## What's next for SoundSight

This system could easily be further augmented with voice recognition and processing software that would allow for feedback that would allow for a much more natural experience. It could also be paired with a simple infrared imaging camera to be used to navigate during the night time, making it universally usable. A final idea for future improvement could be to further enhance the machine vision of the system, thereby maximizing its overall effectiveness