Swift Student Challenge 2024

This years Swift Student Challenge was already announced in 2023. Submissions were open for three weeks in February 2024, and the Deadline was the 25th of February.

I moved to Taipei in February so I didn't have as much time as I would have liked. At the same time I enjoy that the SSC 'forces' me to actually finish a project without getting lost along the way with too many features.

For this years project I decided to make a friend book. I wanted to make it feel a bit like the ones in primary school, so I went for what I felt is a colourful and a bit playful design.

Basically, you can enter your friends and the memories you made with them. Those memories can be viewed as Spheres in augmented reality. The Color of the spheres corresponds to the color of the friend. When you tap a sphere, a rotating cube appears around it and you can read the memory in the top right corner.
You can also see all of your friends and change the color for them. You can enter the place your friends consider home (or where you connect your friends with) and then see all of your friends on a map.

I've integrated TipKit, MapKit and RealityKit into my project. It is built in SwiftUI (minus the AR View which is UIKit). Mainly, I wanted to try new frameworks I haven't really worked with before.
I have worked with RealityKit and MapKit before, but not in the way I used them here.
Most difficult was understanding the ECS Architecture (?) (Entity-Component-System). I am not sure that I used it correctly, but I tried.
As for MapKit: as said, I had tried it, but placing custom markers was something I hadn't tried. Apart from that, the markers are placed by searching for the words and picking the first result. So if the place is for instance 'Birmingham' the user has to specify wich one of them by adding for instance a country. It doesn't matter which language the request is in. I liked how easy MapKit was to setup, and finding a place with a String was easy to do as well.
TipKit was quite easy to integrate, only making useful tips was difficult.

The last picture shows the App Icon I made.

This project was selected as one of the winners of the Swift Student Challenge!

I am very proud and over the moon that this project won. This is my third win in the Swift Student Challenge.

Future

Augmented Realit was always a topic close to my heart. I was very lucky to be able to visit a developer lab for the Vision Pro this year. There I was able to test some of Blossoms code to see if I could bring it from the iPad onto the Vision Pro. Sadly, I currently do not have enough time to work further on Blossom, my hope was that I could publish a fist version before WWDC, but I am not sure that this will be possible right now.