General

SkyWrite will allow a sender to select an appropriate message (e.g. Happy Birthday, Merry Christmas etc) to a postcode. The message will appear in augmented reality 100ft above the ground. Those with the app/service will be notified that a message exists in a nearby postcode.

Users can take photos of the AR messages and view them in SkyWrite’s gallery. There are other features too – including dark mode, Text-to-Speech and font size changes.

Augmented Reality

SkyWrite uses AR Core and OpenGL to display the messages in the “real-world”. Skywrite first scans for a surface, and when a surface is found, a plane is generated and anchors are placed onto the plane. These anchors are used to help keep the 3D models stay where they are when the user moves around with their phone.

IBM Watson’s Text-to-Speech

IBM Watson’s Text-to-Speech is integrated into Skywrite to read the messages out loud. This is extra fun and makes the messages more dynamic, and if a user doesn’t want the messages to be read out loud, they can turn it off in the settings.

Firebase Cloud Messaging

Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) allows Skywrite to send push notifications to users. By adding notifications onto Skywrite, users will receive a notification that a message has appeared in their area whenever a new message has been sent to that postcode.

About us

We are a group of 4 University of Bristol Computer Science students who worked together to develop SkyWrite. The team members are:

Lucy Randewich
Alex Elwood
Anastasia Yi
Joanne Lin

SkyWrite is an open-source project requested by John McNamara (IBM). You can check out the repository here