Advertisement has dominated the Internet in the past decade. It has become ubiquitous and have proven to be an incredible source of cash flow by the likes of Facebook or YouTube. This however can be used in better ways than simply for profit. What if we could make this source of cash into something that can improve the lives of others? That can bring good to the world? And all that, with some augmented reality fun and some exercise!

Augmented Reality: a technology that superimposes a computer-generated image on a user's view of the real world.

Augmented reality (AR) has become one of the technologies that have an incredible potential. From trying out furniture to catching pokemons, there is definitely place for this fascinating tool. And so, we believe that we could give it another interesting use: Helping others in need.

A mobile application goes hand in hand with this technology as users need to move around and look at their surroundings in order to explore the newly created virtual world. React Native is the perfect framework for this task as it enables developers to use React along with native platform capabilities.

Our pipeline starts like this. Users are prompted to a home screen where he/she chooses to what cause they want to send funds to. The choice include the environmental side (WWF - World Wildlife Fund), the health (Doctors Without Borders) and, finally, the social justice side (Amnesty International). Note that these are for now prototypical and we are not currently able to donate to these organizations yet.

The user is then rendered into a reality, but with a twist. A portal door with a specific scenery related to the organization will appear in front where the user would need to enter and collect advertisements on the floor. To collect an ad, the user needs to pinch the add, and he/she is then rewarded with a point. The more points the user earns, the more funding will go to the organization (in other words, all fundings generated from the ads will be given to the chosen organization).

There is panels above the user's head that will keep track of the number of ads picked up.

Note that this is a quick prototype/proof of concept. There is definitely a lot of room for improvement, but I hope the core of it can be understood. We would like to integrate actual ad services such as Google Ad Mob or Ad from Snap Kit to the application in order to actually collect funds. We would also like to create a database to store both the number of ads collected for each organization as well as creating user accounts using Snap Login Kit. Adding the Snap Kit could definitely be a huge plus for us as SnapChat is a big player when it comes to augmented reality. We could therefore experiment with what the Bitmoji and the Snap Creative Kit has to offer. It could also be ideal if we could find a more diverse group of organizations!