HackPrinceton Spring 2024 Winner of Best Developer Tool, Best Use of AI, and Best Application for Interview Process. https://devpost.com/software/otis-gitgraph

Inspiration

As members of Penn Labs, a club at the University of Pennsylvania, teaching Git to newcomers is a recurring task for us. This sparked our interest in exploring how emerging technologies like AR can transform educational experiences, particularly in understanding and utilizing current technologies like Git more effectively.

What it does

"Kepler" transcends traditional educational methods by offering an immersive Git metaverse. It enables users to:

• Visualize any GitHub repository in Virtual Reality and/or Augmented Reality, making Git learning intuitive and engaging.
• Navigate and walk through the repository's history, including branches and commits, on iOS devices or on Apple Vision Pro.
• Access detailed views of commits, including diffs, to learn Git hands-on.
• Leverage AI to uncover insights, patterns, and key contributors, enhancing understanding of the project's development dynamics. Discover story arcs, bug fixes, team roles, and project objectives in a novel way.
• Identify suspicious patterns to flag potential integrity issues in hackathons.
• Allow repository maintainers to analyze contributor trends, fostering a more collaborative open-source development environment.
• Provide recruiters with deep insights into an applicant's project contributions.
• Enable applicants to walk recruiters through their project contributions in a more interactive manner.
• Preserve commit history as an internet artifact, ensuring longevity and accessibility.

How we built it

Our journey in bringing Kepler to life involved a mix of Swift programming, AR/VR technologies, and AI integration, utilizing tools and platforms:

Challenges we ran into

The Kepler project was a rewarding and enriching journey of learning and adaptation, highlighted by:

• The first-time use of Swift and AR/VR technologies by two team members.
• The first hackathon experience for a member, who also transitioned to using a Mac for the first time this week.
• Adapting existing software packages for compatibility with visionOS, including forking and modifying the CodeViewer package.
• Implementing advanced features like topological graph sorting, zoom/collision interactions, and physics in the AR.
• Bridging the gap between AR and VR, ensuring a seamless experience across platforms.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Kepler stands out for both its educational potential and its technical achievements, including:

• Successful deployment on both iOS and visionOS, with interactive and engaging user experiences.
• Integration of diverse features such as AR/VR, AI, and NFT minting into a cohesive educational tool.
• Implementation of additional interactive elements like particle effects, sound effects, and custom gestures, enriching the user experience.

What we learned

• Intricacies of math, coordinates, collisions, and physics in AR environments.
• Swift programming and AR/VR development, especially for team members new to these areas.
• Developing for and translating experiences between iOS and visionOS.
• The challenges and rewards of incorporating a wide range of features and technologies into a single project, facilitated by the support of HackPrinceton's sponsors.

What's next for Kepler

Looking ahead, we want to improve Kepler's capabilities by:

• Integrating AI further to analyze issues, comments, and diffs for even deeper insights into Git repositories.
• Implementing caching for diffs, database support, and pagination.
• Adding support for private repository authentication, broadening Kepler's applicability to a wider range of Git projects. -Integration with IDEs to allow developers to access Kepler's insights and visualization capabilities directly within their coding environments, bridging the gap between code writing and version control learning.