This was truly a once in a lifetime opportunity for us to join a global community of student developers making an impact with technology and we were thrilled to see what other teams were about to bring to the Regional Finals.

I have a lot to share about this journey. I will try to keep it short and concise covering the most important takeaways you can get from my experience so that you too can work towards an idea and compete for a spot at the Imagine Cup.

I am going to share everything I did before the event and during the event so that everyone can benefit from my experience.

So how did I get to know about the Imagine Cup?

It all started back in October 2018 when I was competing at HackHarvard 2018. We had developed an app that could help students understand which food item was eggless or not by just tapping on it.

We had built on Azure’s Cloud services and pitched it to Susan Ibach from Microsoft. She was an absolute gem of a person and told us that if this idea doesn’t win here, we should improve it further and submit a proposal for Microsoft’s Imagine Cup.

We gave our best shot at pitching this idea to all the judges but soon realised that our app was too basic to induce real impact. We had just made an app that could check if a food product contained a certain ingredient or not.

We came back and started working on our app. We brainstormed and tried to find a niche where we could use our existing tech stack to solve a genuine problem.

The last few years have seen an outburst of retail shopping products, which has led to unaware customers being overwhelmed by a vast variety of snacks, supplements juices etc. These customers know what they expect from a product (low calorie count, low artificial colouring, allergic constraints) but are unsure of what products offer and whether they are picking the right one. Therefore, we decided to introduce Spot - Real Time Product Analysis in Augmented Reality for Promoting Healthy Choices.

The initialisation of the app asks the customers for their personal details, including allergies, health conditions and preferences; following which the user is asked to choose the category of products they would buy according to which they would be displayed a set of filters that enable them to make a more informed choice. This is tremendously beneficial to the usual uninformed consumer, as we allow them to compare an unlimited number of products in real time to find the one that suits them best. Another feature, warns the user of a filter that may be harmful for his personal consumption. For instance, a diabetic consumer picking the ‘High Sugar’ filter.

I made a basic UI for our Imagine Cup proposal and spent a lot of time getting opinions and suggestions from our teachers, friends and mentors.