Title: A few months ago I had a silly idea of making a mobile app that used the accelerometer to track the slide motion for playing a virtual trombone. Just wanted to share the story of bringing it to fruition here on hn.<p>I started out spending a couple days trying to get something cross-platform going in Flutter, but it soon became clear that wasn&#x27;t the best fit, seeing as I&#x27;d need native hooks for most of what the app needed to do, and it wasn&#x27;t yet clear it&#x27;d be possible at all. So I switched to making it an iOS app in Swift. The accelerometer data turned out to be not nearly accurate enough to do the job, so I switched to using the camera&#x2F;AR using ARKit... and it worked instantly. Like the very first time I hooked up a slider UI element to the distance function. It felt a bit like magic. And also just ridiculous.<p>Here&#x27;s a video I recorded to send to some friends at the time:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;6BIogfGH3IQ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;6BIogfGH3IQ</a><p>Here&#x27;s a video of it in action in it&#x27;s current state:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtube.com&#x2F;shorts&#x2F;8kS2TRzV4I4?feature=share" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtube.com&#x2F;shorts&#x2F;8kS2TRzV4I4?feature=share</a><p>Apologies for the non-responsive website (using nextjs on cloudflare). It doesn&#x27;t look great on mobile, which is kind of inexcusable, I&#x27;m working on it:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tromphoneapp.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tromphoneapp.com</a><p>Anyway, I&#x27;m not sure where I&#x27;ll take it from here. I have some ideas for more AR content like hats, heart eyes, etc. Possibly a song editor so users can add songs that might have issues with copyright if I included them in the app? Any ideas you guys have would be fun to hear.
Upvote: