After two weeks spent on developing an augmented reality app, Levi and I wanted to try our hand at audio augmented reality. We got to do exactly that at the Capitol Royale Hackathon 2019 with the Bose AR frames. We recruited our other roommate Clovis to help us out and build mar/Key.

Los Angeles is an absolute hotbed for local venues and rising artists. As a team of all Los Angeles natives, we wanted to build a mobile app that would help other music lovers learn about and listen to artists who will be playing at a local venues. We saw a new and unique opportunity to present this experience with innovative Bose AR technology. By integrating music with Bose AR controls and venue information from the Bandsintown API, users of mar/Key can walk along the streets of Los Angeles and directly interact with the venues in front of them by listening to artists that would be playing there in the near future.

mar/KEY takes the geo-coordinates of the user and other inputs (such as date), and submits those parameters into the Bandsintown API to get all the events, artists, and venues that are near the location of the user. The app would then compile all the unique artists into a list and play the audio clips associated to each artist. Bose AR would act as an additional control so users can choose to play an artist by nodding their head, skip a song by tapping their sunglasses, or choose the next artist by shaking their head.

You can view the demo of mar/Key here:

If you would like to see the source code, you can visit our GitHub repo at the link below:

This hackathon was a very exciting and rewarding experience. We had not worked with Bose AR nor the Bandsintown API before, but managed to integrate them into mar/KEY. We also got to see a lot of other cool projects. Since we got an honorable mention, we also walked away with some cool Bose AR shades!