Hi, there. I’ve been meaning to write a post about how we built LeapDrop at the InOut 3.0 Hackathon. We eventually won Best Hardware Hack sponsored by Hackster.io.
Team TheGeekBros has three bros in it: Siddharth Goswami, Soham Dodia, and 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 this). We had a LeapMotion, a borrowed Google Cardboard knock-off, and some two-way tape to piece it all together.
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:
- C1 registers with the Server. An ID is assigned to C1.
- C2 registers with the Server. An ID is assigned to C2.
- PH registers with the Server.
- LMC registers with the Server.
- LM detects a pinch gesture.
- LM notifies LMC about the detected pinch gesture.
- LMC notifies the Server about the detected pinch gesture.
- Server asks C1 to show its QR Code. This QR Code has encoded within itself the ID assigned to it in Step 1.
- Server asks C2 to show its QR Code. This QR Code has encoded within itself the ID assigned to it in Step 2.
- Server asks PH 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.]
- PH sends the decoded ID of the source computer to the Server. [C1 in this case.]
- Server asks the computer to which the ID belongs [C1 in this case] to send it’s last visited URL.
- C1 sends the last visited URL to the Server.
- LM detects a release gesture.
- LM notifies LMC about the detected release gesture.
- LMC notifies the Server about the detected release gesture.
- Server asks PH 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 release gesture in front of a computer, the head-mounted mobile-phone camera will the the QR Code of the target computer.]
- PH sends the decoded ID of the target computer to the Server. [C2 in this case.]
- Server asks C1 to stop showing its QR Code.
- Server asks C2 to stop showing its QR Code.
- Server asks the target computer [C2 in this case] to open the URL obtained in Step 13.
We got a bit 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 rad 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.
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. (Paging 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: Third time’s the charm.
Anyway, that’s it for this reeeeally long post. If you’re still reading, thanks for sticking around for this long. 😄