Manicure

A world of AR nail art at your fingertips ;)

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Inspiration:

Nail art is often overlooked as an outlet for creativity and forgotten as a fashion accessory. We tend to gravitate towards the bigger articles of fashion that we forget to appreciate the beauty in the smaller pleasures of life: nail art. We expect so much from our hands on a daily basis to help us chase our dreams and aspirations whether that be coding an impactful app, drafting the blueprints of beautiful architecture, writing a revolutionary novel, or simply creating. Weirdly enough, we notice something as small as having nice nails can boost your confidence and transform your mood for the day. ManiCURE your day!

We were inspired by the recent increase in AR filter technology, used for content creation and other creative purposes popularized by platforms including Instagram, Tik Tok, Snapchat, and more. These ideas inspired Manicure, the first-ever nail art filter platform. Our design is unique, energetic, and vibrant, capturing the ~vibe~ of both Manicure's users and target audience.

What it does:

Manicure is the all-in-one platform for users, content creators, and marketers alike to explore nail art, try dazzling designs, and share their photos on social media. It includes a home page, offering users the choice to sign in or create an account to save filters with, a camera page for users to share their photos, and an explore filters page where users can select from a gallery of different nail designs and try them on.

How we built it:

We started with a design mockup on Figma, then built the app using XCode and Swift. We integrated Apple's Reality Composer capabilities into Swift to create the AR component of the app.

Challenges we ran into:

Building the nail art AR itself. We struggled to work across various AR platforms to detect and build a filter on a hand. Originally, we wanted to train a machine learning model using Tensorflow to detect the hand, but we struggled to find sufficient datasets for hand recognition. We eventually landed on Apple's Reality Composer, which required scanning an actual hand to create an identifiable AR object onto which the nail scene could attach.

Accomplishments that we're proud of:

Building the UI/UX design with a software (Figma) that we were all originally inexperienced in, launching an augmented reality filter, and figuring out how to implement camera access within the app! This was an impressive feat for us given our entire team consists of beginner coders and UX/UI designers where it was a first for many of us. We are proud of creating a visually appealing app successfully built to cater to a youthful audience.

What we learned:

Due to our overall lack of experience, we learned so much throughout this process, including how to access the camera, create a pop-up menu, an interactive and scrollable feed, develop an augmented reality scene that can attach to a scanned object, and use ARKit.

What's next for Manicure:

Future iterations of Manicure will focus on integrating our filters across various content creation platforms, adding greater detail to our filters, and implementing a feature in which the camera tab allows users to add their own art as filters within the app. Others future iterations include creating a feature to post your nail picture to external social media platforms and a feature that allows you to save filters into a collection of your favorite nail filters. We also hope to build a back-end for the app to allow users to log in, save filters, and customize their filters by color and pattern.

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