Tackling inconveniences and winning the world’s largest hackathon: A detailed account
It all started in November 2016 when a member of Next Tech Lab came across the initiative of the largest digital movement by the Government of India — Smart India Hackathon 2017. With so many problem statements at our disposal, we were awestruck by the sheer number of hacks that we could build.
Forming a team from Pausch Lab for Extended Reality at Next Tech Lab, we rounded upon the following problem statement under the Ministry of Tourism:
Smart solution for providing commentary of exhibits in Museum in India
A total of 55,000 teams applied for Smart India Hackathon 2017, out of which 55 were selected for Ministry of Tourism
The proposed hack
We proposed an interactive Mobile Application for enhancing on-site museum and art gallery experience through Augmented Reality technology. This experience could not only promote the social and educational roles of traditional museums in the digital era but also boost the value of cultural heritage.
Our objective was to design an on-site personalized museum recommendation system to extend the connection between visitors and collections, focusing on the user experience.
What we came up with
ARtifacts is an application which enhances the visitors’ experience and knowledge about the artifact present in front of them. This is achieved through Augmented Reality (AR), Image tracking and targeting. With the help of these technologies, visitors can see extra digital content on top of the actual objects at the museum. To do this, they only need a smartphone. By tracking the image present on a printed paper, the visitor can view the 3D model of the artifact and study it. The application scans the image, checks with a server hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) for a match and then fetches information accordingly. The information is delivered to the user using a TextToSpeech (TTS) service.
The app was solely built on Unity with the 3D models built on Autodesk 3ds Max and Blender and SDKs like Vuforia and Google VR.
Getting to the Nodal centre
Reaching the nodal centre was a big task for us. The nodal centre was Mar Baselios Instute of Technology and Science (MBITS), located in Kothamangalam — in the outskirts of Kochi, Kerala.
From SRM University, we had to take a local train to Chennai Central Station, consequently from where we took a train to Ernakulam Junction, Kochi. At the local train station, one member realised that he forgot his luggage in the auto rickshaw that we took to the station. A wild goose chase ensued and the bag was finally found — just in time for him to catch the local train.
The train journey to Ernakulam Junction was about 12–13 hours long and we reached at around 2:30am. Due to a strike by auto rickshaw drivers against cab-aggregating companies, there were no cabs available around. For the cabs that were out and about, the rickshaw drivers would shoo them away and not let passengers enter their vehicles. The auto fare, on the other hand, was over-exagerated and was not worth it. We decided to walk to a cafe that was open round the clock, around 2 kilometres away. But, we found a person who was willing to drive us there.
After having a very early breakfast, we walked to Ernakulam bus stand (around 3kms away) and got on the bus going to Munnar through Kothamangalam.
Day 1: Sleep
Tired from our adventures, we slept through the day and woke up in the afternoon to refuel. In the evening, we were given our table for the hackathon. It was a modest table with a maximum capacity of 7 with a screen attached to a pole, which we used to put up a countdown timer. The only thing missing? A wifi connection.
We were only given a LAN cable and they gave us options to either — buy a wireless router (for Rs. 800) or rent one (for Rs.400). We ended up not buying one but renting it from a student at MBITS.
We befriended a couple of students from MBITS who were very helpful throughout the course of the hackathon.
Every team was supposed to bring a standee but we ended up not getting one, so we created a hacky solution, by breaking a stick file and applying tape all over it.
We were also supposed to bring printed T-shirts but we printed stickers instead and pasted them over our black tees. Nifty, right?
Day 2: The first day of SIH
The reporting time was 8am for all teams. After breakfast, there was an orientation session by the Ministry of Tourism. The hacking began at around 11am.
Since we were a team of 6 members, we divided tasks and started working on them (divide and conquer). Working through the day, we took shifts to have lunch so that we could keep an eye on our laptops and devices.
Our proposal included a multilingual text-to-speech feature, but there is no free API available which does the same. Cost was to be taken into account for the hack as well since the Government was planning to bring out the application in the real world.
Since TTS was a no-go, we decided to record our own voices in Hindi, English and Malayalam. We had a pretty diverse team with members fluent in Bengali, Hindi, Gujarati, Telugu and Tamil.
For Malayalam, however, we asked our local friends from MBITS to translate the given speech and speak in front of a computer while it was being recorded.
Day 3: Integration and final day of SIH
Team member Amarnath worked throughout the night to integrate different modules together. There was a zumba session scheduled at 12am where a video of zumba instructors was played, but the participants decided to go ahead and do bhangra anyway.
At sunrise, the judges went to each and every team to scrutinise their hack. Firing questions, they tried to understand the hack and its worth to the Ministry. We received valuable insight about our product, where a similar concept was developed by an Ashram (a monastry). We countered the argument by explaining that our app was one step ahead by integrating the multilingual feature — to increase the reach for a bigger audience.
Apart from the technical details, the judges asked for a sound business plan. The business plan took into account the price of Vuforia, 3ds Max and employing people to create 3D models.
After hacking time was over, every team was supposed to demo their product. We set up our table and the judges came over. There were around 12–14 judges, but we went ahead with demoing the product on one device. When the other members of our team realised that not all judges could see what was going on, they went up and demoed the app to them on multiple devices.
Presence of mind is key.
After the demoes, the judges locked themselves in a conference room. The top ten teams were announced and called up on stage to address Kerala media. We were one of them.
After an hour or so, the judges started announcing the winners. They went from the 5th team to the 1st team. They declared Team number 5 as the winning team and we were called up on stage. There was a team beside us which recorded our reaction video since one of the team members had an intuition about us winning. We ran towards the stage and were asked to address the rest of the participants. All I said was,“Smart India Hackathon is such a great initiative” and then proceeded to move away when a voice from the back stopped me and asked me to say more. I spaced out, so I passed over the microphone to my fellow team members. All that adrenaline!
Definitely quite an experience!
Press coverage by Business Standard
News on SRM University’s website
Article by Naman Maheshwari, Board Member and Researcher in Pausch Lab at Next Tech.
