Building LeapDrop

Hi, there. I’ve been meaning to write a post about how we built at the 3.0 Hackathon. We eventually won Best Hardware Hack sponsored by . LeapDrop InOut Hackster.io Team TheGeekBros has three bros in it: , , and . Siddharth Goswami Soham Dodia I InOut had lots of tracks this time around, so we got to dabble around various ideas — eventually settling onto building something in the Virtual-Reality/Augmented-Reality track — something that’s been an interest of ours for a really long time. We had a couple of ideas: a zombie-shooter FPS based on AR, a VR desktop experience (sort of like ). We had a , a borrowed knock-off, and some two-way tape to piece it all together. this LeapMotion Google Cardboard Now, none of us really knew how to proceed with any of the ideas. We didn’t have experience writing code to build VR/AR experiences — just some ideas in our heads — results of all those hours of sci-fi entertainment. So we sat there for two hours, cracking jokes and Googling stuff. It became evident after inefficiently sharing links back-and-forth for a while that it would be practically impossible for us to work on any of our ideas so far. Then it hit us. We’d been sharing links really inefficiently. I don’t remember how, but maybe it was a Messenger group? We recalled this scene from the first Iron Man movie where Tony Stark movies stuff across computers (and onto a hologram) using just his hands: registers with the . An ID is assigned to . C1 Server C1 registers with the . An ID is assigned to . C2 Server C2 registers with the . PH Server registers with the . LMC Server detects a pinch gesture. LM notifies about the detected pinch gesture. LM LMC notifies the about the detected pinch gesture. LMC Server asks to show its QR Code. This QR Code has encoded within itself the ID assigned to it in Step 1. Server C1 asks to show its QR Code. This QR Code has encoded within itself the ID assigned to it in Step 2. Server C2 asks to detect the QR Code it sees, and send whatever the QR Code has encoded within itself. [This works because when the user makes a pinch gesture in front of a computer, the head-mounted mobile-phone camera will see the QR Code of the source computer.] Server PH sends the decoded ID of the source computer to the Server. [ in this case.] PH C1 asks the computer to which the ID belongs [ in this case] to send it’s last visited URL. Server C1 sends the last visited URL to the . C1 Server detects a release gesture. LM notifies about the detected release gesture. LM LMC notifies the about the detected release gesture. LMC Server asks to detect the it sees, and send whatever the QR code has encoded within itself. [This works because when the user makes a release gesture in front of a computer, the head-mounted mobile-phone camera will the the QR Code of the target computer.] Server PH QR Code sends the decoded ID of the target computer to the . [ in this case.] PH Server C2 asks to stop showing its QR Code. Server C1 asks to stop showing its QR Code. Server C2 asks the target computer [ in this case] to open the URL obtained in Step 13. Server C2 We got a of attention from the judges and fellow hackers around us, but unfortunately didn’t get selected to demo on-stage. This was a real bummer, since I can’t help but think to this date, how it would have been to grab a webpage from the projector-screen and put it on a laptop on a totally different side of the room. bit rad Anyway, when the prizes were being announced for the Hardware category, I thought maybe we were deserving of the third prize. The third prize was announced and it wasn’t us. I thought maybe we were second since LeapDrop was really cool. The second prize wasn’t us either. I gave up on winning a Hackathon prize this time around. ( Imposter Syndrome!) TheGeekBros flashed on the screen as the first prize, and we took a jolly ride to Cloud 9. I had been to the first two versions of InOut as well, but like they say: . Paging Third time’s the charm Anyway, that’s it for this long post. If you’re still reading, thanks for sticking around for this long. 😄 reeeeally GitHub repo for LeapDrop.