Description as a Tweet:

We are AiPPAREL, a startup that sells clothing and accessories designed with artificial intelligence. We use neural style transfer to allow users to create unique and beautiful shirts, hoodies, phone cases, and more. Users can then buy their creations through our shopping portal.

Inspiration:

When all becomes monotone, we turn to creativity to bring color into our communities. Creativity inspires and drives us to develop innovative solutions, so we wanted to create a tool to express the feelings and personalities of each individual through technology.

What it does:

Our project is a full-stack webapp that allows users to perform neural style transfer on uploaded images. Once the style transfer has been performed, users have the option to buy clothing designed using the output of the style transfer.

How we built it:

We implemented neural style transfer on Google Cloud, then built a node server to run style transfer commands on the Google Cloud machine. Next, we expanded the client to be able to upload images to the server and we wrote code to serve the client’s session with a hash for each call of the style transfer algorithm. We then further extended the server to pass the result through the printful API to generate product markups in real time. We then wrote javascript to take those markups and render them in a shopping page associated with the request’s hash to serve to the user. We also used bootstrap, two.js, and particles.js to create custom animations and spice up the front end design.

Technologies we used:

HTML/CSS
Javascript
Node.js
Express
Python
AI/Machine Learning
Misc

Challenges we ran into:

Trouble connecting APIs
Asynchronous execution of python commands in a virtual environment on Google Cloud
Time crunch
Bugs
Trouble with CSS

Accomplishments we're proud of:

Well-designed full-stack application hosted in the cloud with an intuitive user interface
Developing a service that doesn’t currently exist in the market

What we've learned:

Google Cloud Platform
Two.js
Particles.js
Git
Printful API
WebDev Best Practices

What's next:

We will be turning this into a fully functioning business after the hackathon and customers will be able to purchase products once we go live. Our next steps are to:
1. Enable the processing of transactions and payments
2. Optimize the data pipelines and clean up the code base
3. Upgrade our servers to function at scale
4. Establish a legal entity and develop marketing campaigns

Built with:

Caffeine and Passion

Prizes we're going for:

Best Finance Hack
Best Documentation
Best Venture Pitch
Best Web Hack
Best Domain Name
Best Machine Learning Hack
Best Use of Google Cloud

AiPPAREL