apple: Meet the winners from India of Apple’s WWDC 2022 challenge – Times of India

Apple’s annual developer conference — WWDC — is just around the corner. The five-day event kicks off on June 6. Every year before WWDC, Apple holds the Swift Student Challenge — a scholarship is given to upcoming developers — and this year there have been a few recipients from India as well.
Among them is Suyash Lanawat, a 25-year-old civil engineer who has a passion for coding. Lanawat did his civil engineering to “help foster the family business, back of the mind I knew that I was passionate about technology.” This passion led him to Apple Developer Academy in Naples, Italy. At the academy, Lanawat is working on an app for people with hearing and visual disabilities and is trying to integrate haptics on iPhone and Apple Watch, to help them communicate better.
About the Swift Student Challenge, Lanavat says that it is all about how you can delight the user with an experience of under three minutes. It reminded him of his childhood days, he says. “My Playground is a small tribute to my grandmother who loved playing cards with me. It is a human experience of a card trick delivered to you, just as if performed live by me.”
22-year-old Geetansh Aatrey from Ahmedabad says that his elder brother inspired him to start his coding journey when he was 13. A student at KIIT University, his entry for the Swift Student Challenge is an OTP app called Vault which has privacy as its core feature. Apple’s tech always fascinated him and he wanted to be a part of the ecosystem. ”I feel that being a winner in this year’s competition validates my efforts in learning about the ecosystem and pushes me to build more unique and attractive applications in the Apple ecosystem that may benefit society.
Jaskaran Singh knows that be it long study sessions, coding or any focused work, sitting for extended time lowers blood circulation, causes neck pain and harms the eyes. “I built ‘Freshr’ so that you can avoid this with just 3 minutes,” says the winner of Swift Student Challenge 2022. He further explains that the app gets your blood pumping by taking you through simple exercises. It uses Computer Vision and ML to track your body and actions and determine if what you are doing is correct and that you’re actually doing it. Next, there’s neck stretching with real-time head position detection, so that you can get the perfect amount of stretch to relax your neck with onscreen guidance. Finally, to lubricate dry eyes you need to swiftly blink your eyes, there’s automatic detection and countdown. “The app is designed to be intelligent and automatically handles progress through activities,” he explains.
For Singh, design and coding are outlets for his creativity. He is thrilled to win the Swift Student Challenge as it was always a dream of his to win it. “I learnt and grew a lot during the Challenge and winning has given me the confidence to do more with my skills to make a positive impact on the world,” he adds.