Show HN: Mobile Game – Car Hunters

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2vhYLDIvu0

by kosche • 6 years ago

53 27 6 years ago

kosche11• 6 years ago

Hi guys,

I want to share a project me and couple more guys were working on last year - Car Hunters. Essentially we built a mobile game using Computer Vision and AI.

Some problems we had to solve while working on Car Hunters:

- we collected a pretty solid dataset of car images (~3mil photos so far). For that we built own software, which helps us to support car models hierarchy, maintain links, retrain recognition models and deliver recognition model-binaries to the end-user devices;

- make/model recognition is done on the end-user device and both android/iOS platforms run neural network inference on GPU;

- we built-in pretty fast and reliable object-tracker which is independent of platform as well.

So what is Car Hunters? We've all heard about Pokemon Go, where you hunt for virtual creatures. We offer you instead to get points and unlock achievements by searching for cars in real world!

More details and description can be found in Google Play and Apple App Store. Car Hunters is available only in 10 countries for now. Let me know if you unable to download it but would like to.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/car-hunters-discover-cars/id14...

I would appreciate if you share Car Hunters with those, who might love cars as much as we do!

Thanks.

jermaustin1• 6 years ago

So are you just gamifying users collecting a large data set for you? I think that is genius.

What are you doing to encourage engagement? Why would one keep playing? Is there something other than just seeing their score go up?

kosche11• 6 years ago

Hi jermaustin1! Not exactly, we don't use users' data to extend dataset. Photos made by users are labeled (classified) by existing nn, and you don't want to use results produces by nn to retrain same nn.

Currently we have points, achievements for unique cars, some useful info, like prices of the cars. But we are constantly thinking what to add more.

nexuist• 6 years ago

Just downloaded the app for iOS. Really cool idea.

kosche11• 6 years ago

Thank you! :)

dlivingston• 6 years ago

What an insanely clever idea. Great work! 3M photos is a huge dataset; I’m guessing each photo already had associated metadata and you did not hand-classify? Where did you grab such a large dataset?

kosche11• 6 years ago

There are two main sources: used car sites and youtube. Used car sites have ads classified across make/model hierarchy already - you just need to filter away unsuitable photos - this task can be automated. And youtube is good for new models. We do some hand-classification as well, but only for rare cars, where images are not easy to find.

sefrost• 6 years ago

Do you have a service like this in the US (or your country)?

You can enter a registration plate and get a huge amount of data, including historic MOT details:

https://www.gov.uk/get-vehicle-information-from-dvla

I’m not sure what an MOT is called in other countries, but it ensures a car is roadworthy.

JoeDaDude• 6 years ago

Cool idea, a game using ML object recognition. Haven't tried it but it looks more reliable than Plantsnap [1].

1. https://www.plantsnap.com/

dmitripopov• 6 years ago

After reading the title and watching first 2 seconds I thought it will fire a rocket launcher and the car would go up in flames thanks to AR.

kosche11• 6 years ago

That is an interesting idea :)

namelosw• 6 years ago

And the car owner can deploy static defenses and traps...

dicknuckle• 6 years ago

That would be so cool. While you're walking away from your parking space, you get a satellite view or an AR view where you can drop defenses. I think the satellite view would be harder since you'd have to pick your parking spot so the UI can place your top down car picture and then place obstacles and defenses

anotheryou• 6 years ago

Aww man, worst timing now that more and more are getting locked down :/

maybe repost in a month or two or three

kosche11• 6 years ago

Yes. I thought about that too. Totally agree, timing is not 'perfect' :(, but could not just wait.

axegon_2• 6 years ago

This is a brilliant idea actually. This could be a brilliant addition for car resellers, given that most use their smartphones to take pictures of their car park: New listing > take photos > most of the data is pre-filled.

kosche11• 6 years ago

Yes, you a right. We think about this direction. Here is another video which shows how this can be used for 'quick cars search'

https://youtu.be/BFlaqSz0Cmo

axegon_2• 6 years ago

Very impressive, keep up the good work :)

pmg101• 6 years ago

Love this idea! Perfect timing as well with other social activities curtailed makes walking the neighbourhood streets into a fun game!

aliswe• 6 years ago

I didn't really get the game idea, but cool demo and maybe a fun challenge would be to find a car worth a certain amount of money...

kosche11• 6 years ago

Yes. We thought about using car's value for quests/achievements. Haven't find reliable source for pricing data yet.

Current concept idea is very similar to one you suggested. Every car is assigned with some amount of points based on car's rarity. Player is then tasked to find certain models and get points for that.

We are thinking about adding 'social' element at some point: function to share car photos comment/react on them

godfreyho3• 6 years ago

What a coincidence I have also launched very similar app recently. However, mine doesn’t have the gamification concept (hunter) which I think is brilliant. Mine can be found here: https://about.mudcar.dev/

kosche11• 6 years ago

ha! Interesting. Did you train model yourself or find some ready available?

BTW we also have an API for car's make/model/years/color/angle recognition. We can share API key for that if you'd like: https://carnet.ai

godfreyho3• 6 years ago

We collected images, labeled the data and trained our model all on our own. We now have about 330k images (about 1800 models). We used resnet152 to train it.

Show HN: Mobile Game – Car Hunters

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