We know that Apple holds the "China University Computer Competition - Mobile Application Innovation Competition" for students every year at Zhejiang University in the United Nations, which is an excellent stage for student developers who love programming and development to show their technology.
On December 12, 2021, the final of the 6th Mobile App Innovation Competition came to a successful conclusion. This year is the sixth year of the mobile application innovation competition, and unlike previous years, this year, due to the impact of the epidemic, the final was moved to be held online, but IT Home, as one of the participants in the event, still feels the enthusiasm of the majority of student developers.
According to the introduction of the organizers of the competition and the leaders of the organizing committee, this year's competition attracted more than 4200 students, 1472 teams registered to participate, the preliminary competition of effective works reached 1167, and finally 59 works were shortlisted for the finals, both the number of participants and the number of finalists reached a new record high.
At the same time, the themes of the works cover a wide range of fields, including smart medical care, social responsibility, traditional culture protection, sports, learning, and convenient life for special groups. In addition, this year's mobile application innovation competition also set up an AR track, which complements the current phenomenon of AR technology and application.
In this mobile application innovation competition, there are many student developers who have made a deep impression on their products, whether it is their creativity to solve social real-world problems with programming, or the complex technologies used behind the works, many of which are eye-catching.
For example, the digital twin application "Shu'er" developed by the team from Zhejiang University has amazed the IT home with its mature technology and unique creativity. The app is also the winner of the most innovative award and first prize of this year's mobile app innovation competition.
"Shuer" is an electronic pet that applies new technologies, and the team hopes to help users perceive their own characteristics and cultivate self-habits through the digital twin process of raising pets.
Now the app will generally use a set of algorithms to make recommendations, and then create an information cocoon for people, but we believe that technology should be good, we hope to use our own App to make people shape a newer self, let users shape a better self.
Wang Zhenyang, a student of the development team of "Shu'er", said this when introducing the work.
In fact, the digital twin of "Shu'er" is to use the image of electronic pets as a projection of users in the virtual world, but unlike the previous digital twins, the previous digital twins are often in appearance, and "Shu'er" prefers to be a digital twin with the essential characteristics of the user's inner personality, habits, and emotions. Of course, the technology involved in this is more complicated.
According to the team members of Shuer, when achieving this product goal, we must first parameterize and dataize the inherent characteristics of users, this process has not been done by too many people before, so everyone is also feeling the stones across the river during development.
Then, they will use some machine learning methods, use the parameter training mode to transfer some of the user's behavior to a parameter vector, and then do number generation on the parameter vector, and then study some characteristics corresponding to some parameters... While listening to their introductions, IT Home can already feel the complex technology behind this small electronic pet.
When communicating with the "Shu'er" team, some media felt that this idea was invisibly similar to the current concept of the very hot metaverse, but Wang Zhenyang said that he did not want to rub the recently exploded metaverse concept, preferring to call it the projection of real people in the digital space.
Such a brilliant work would be a bit written if it only existed in the competition. In the communication, some people also asked about the commercialization of "Shu'er". The developers also affirmed this, they said that they really want to use this work to do some entrepreneurial practice, they registered the company in July, and then self-funded, completed the seed round, and are currently doing development iterations.
I hope to complete the angel round financing after the competition, because the three of us are all junior students in the School of Computer Science, and then we will immediately have to consider the future promotion or graduation project.
Wang Zhenyang said.
In addition to "Shuel", there are also some works that are also very outstanding, such as an application that focuses on Alzheimer's disease population, "Picking Up Memories - Early Screening Application for Cognitive Impairment" (hereinafter referred to as "Picking Up Memories").
"Pick Up Memories" is an application that helps potential Alzheimer's patients do early screening, through a series of game levels to assess the elderly's short-term memory, executive ability and recognition ability, these three abilities are also the key basis for clinical diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease.
For this software, the evaluation given by the competition judges is:
What needs to be praised is not only the team's positive response to the major issue of pension in the recall project, but also their unremitting efforts to effectively combine digital innovation and industry professional solutions.
When communicating with the Shiyi team, Ling Wenyuan, who was responsible for user research and application architecture design, told IT Home that in order to ensure the scientific nature of the work, they specially went to the Geriatric Department of Shanghai Sixth People's Hospital to conduct an in-depth interview with Professor Guo Qihao, director of the Department of Geriatrics, so as to understand the main diagnostic test methods and more professional background knowledge for the elderly dementia in the clinic, and finally let "Shiyi" present it in three games.
Of course, in addition to learning about professional knowledge from doctors, the small developers of "Pick Up Memories" also went to the community to communicate with some elderly people to understand their needs and ideas, and even went to the hospital to communicate with some elderly people who may have initial cognitive impairments to understand their living conditions. In the future, they hope that their work will not only be a tool for evaluation and screening, but also add some training and training cycles, such as regular review reminders to users.
One detail is that the "Pick Up Memories" team chose to develop their own works on the iPad first, and when the IT home asked this question, the Shi Shuyuan students in the team said:
We chose the iPad instead of the phone because we feel that for the elderly, the iPad is more in line with their needs, both in terms of the feeling of interaction and the size of the screen. On the other hand, for developers like us who have little experience, iPad devices, including Apple's entire technology ecosystem, are very suitable for us who have less experience to intervene, and the process of packaging and publishing our works to the iPad platform is also very smooth.
In this year's mobile application innovation competition, the AR track was specially added, so this year there have been many cases of using AR technology to complete ideas, and in the AR track, the most noteworthy is the AR track first prize winner "ARCT".
Compared with the previous two works, "Shu'er" and "Picking Up Memories", "ARCT" is more fashionable and cooler. The app uses AR technology to allow users to place virtual icons in the real world, such as iOS 15 app icons, various stickers, etc., and can even add a virtual message board somewhere in the city, if other users pass by here, see the message board, and communicate.
Zhang Biao, the creative initiator of the "ARCT" app, said when talking about why he wanted to develop such an application, mainly because he felt that modern cities have all kinds of bustling streets and gorgeous signs, but behind the prosperity is serious light pollution, and the amount of disposable signs also increases the waste and consumption of resources, and at the same time, there is a serious "thousand cities" problem in the process of urban development.
In the exchange, Zhang Also said that Apple's AR Kit4 launched at WWDC in 2020 has a geographic information anchor technology that can enable persistent storage of virtual objects; and their fine map model launched on iOS 15 at WWDC in 2021 provides data guarantee for accurate positioning technology based on 3D maps. These two technologies are the keys to ARCT's ability to take shape.
"The former Location Anchor was only available in 25 cities in the U.S. and London in the world, and this time we brought Location Anchor to China." Zhang Biao explained in detail.
Because the competition first introduced the AR track, many developers will inevitably have some difficulties in the application of AR technology. In the case of ARCT, the development process was not smooth sailing, and many technical problems were encountered. But fortunately, with the help of Apple, it was finally solved.
For this, the ARCT team gave a special example, in the development process, the team found that when the placed AR object is more than 10 meters away from the user's mobile phone, the object will automatically disappear, only when a certain option is deleted, it can reappear. At first, the team was very puzzled by this problem, and then fed back to Apple, and Apple also replied in a very timely manner and gave a solution.
Throughout the process, we have been enthusiastically learning some of Apple's new technologies and new methods, and have maintained close communication.
Another development member on the team said.
Of course, in addition to these three products, there are many outstanding works in this mobile application innovation competition and interesting ideas from student developers.
It is worth mentioning that at the final award ceremony of this mobile application innovation competition, Ge Yue, managing director of Apple Greater China, also attended the ceremony and delivered a speech. Ge Yue said that since the mobile application innovation competition was held for 6 years, it has trained more than 20,000 student developers and helped more than 250 colleges and universities set up iOS clubs and even set up iOS courses.
These student developers use cutting-edge technologies such as AR to create apps that improve our lives. Over the past six years, tens of thousands of students have enhanced their programming skills and been mentored by Apple engineers and professional developers. Thank you to all the teachers and experts who helped these young people to develop their creativity.
Ge Yue said further.
And when we see these talented and innovative student developers, IT House is also infected by their passion. Xiaobian can't help but think that in fact, these young developers can't help but be the "future force" under Apple's development ecology, and they are also the "fresh blood" of the digital upgrading of the whole society. In the vast world of "digital transformation of the world", their outstanding talent and continuous creativity are bound to have great potential on the road to the new world.