
Show HN: Mobile Game – Car Hunters - kosche
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2vhYLDIvu0
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kosche
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...](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/car-hunters-discover-
cars/id1452943781)

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

Thanks.

~~~
jermaustin1
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?

~~~
kosche
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.

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axegon_
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.

~~~
kosche
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](https://youtu.be/BFlaqSz0Cmo)

~~~
axegon_
Very impressive, keep up the good work :)

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dmitripopov
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.

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

~~~
dicknuckle
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

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godfreyho
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/](https://about.mudcar.dev/)

~~~
kosche
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](https://carnet.ai)

~~~
godfreyho
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.

~~~
kosche
I see. Sounds pretty similar to what we do.

~~~
godfreyho
We are just CS students and started this just for learning and experiencing
with hands on computer vision and AI. So things are not very mature. Like we
haven’t make the inferencing on the end user devices. The recognition runs on
the server instead. And we don’t have many images as you do. We just crawled
images on the web. Also, it doesn’t work very well with cars that can’t be
found at where we lived, because we dont even know those models exist lol

~~~
kosche
We had/have this problem too. If nn "sees" unknown model it tries to classify
it as one of known models. To avoid this, we added 'Other/Other' bucket and
put ~3k images of different cars/buses/trucks in there. Now unknown models in
most cases are classified as 'Other/Other' label.

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

maybe repost in a month or two or three

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

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JoeDaDude
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/](https://www.plantsnap.com/)

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aliswe
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...

~~~
kosche
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

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pmg101
Love this idea! Perfect timing as well with other social activities curtailed
makes walking the neighbourhood streets into a fun game!

