Edit: Wow! Literally few days after posting, there are already several open PR and quite a few great suggestions. Huge thanks to all of you, the FOSS community really rocks!
Original post:
TLdR. Nothing major, just needs help finding an app icon.
I’m developing VScan, a little project aiming to research how vision LLMs could help out blind people on travel and in their every-day life by substituting eyesight for various visual tasks.
My project is not a “magical AI app” which is going to solve every problem on the click of a button. In fact, I don’t use the “AI branding” at all, because I think it’s very misleading for the general audience. It’s more of an experiment to find out if the blind people could use LLMs as tools for visual cognition in a way that would be useful.
I’m trying to be as clear and specific as I can about the used technology, and providing as much customization as possible without sacrificing convenience. Of course, the project is completely open-source, does not collect any user data and while the first generations only supported GPT models, because that was the only thing usable for vision at the time, the current dev version already supports defining an arbitrary LLM provider (including a self-hosted server), and the ability to choose any model supported by the respective provider.
I’m facing just one major issue. I’m blind myself, coding the app as my personal tool. And I’m having quite a hard time finding an app icon that would work on the modern Android systems and setting it up properly. To be honest, I’m quite lost in the various suggested standards, there are the ordinary raster PNG icons, vector based SVG icons, and these days Android seems to also have some multi-part contextual XML based icons which as far as I understand should adapt to the different screens, configurations, themes etc. but I genuinely have no idea where to find these and sofar whatever I tried ended up as some undefinable point cloud on the screen.
Normally I wouldn’t care about such things, but having an app icon is the requirement for getting accepted into app stores like F-Droid or Google Play, and subsequently, to the users. Nobody these days is willing to side-load apps anymore.
If anybody with Android development experience could take a look on this, I would be very grateful. All that’s needed to do is finding a suitable icon on one of the icon portals, preferably in shape of an eye, or a camera (the one used to mark video recording), although the exact appearance doesn’t really matter, the users won’t see it anyway. It can be free or paid, as far as the price is reasonable. Then you can either open a PR yourself (the project does not require anything special to build, it’s just the ordinary Android Studio stuff), or you could explain to me how to implement the icons and I will try to follow.
Thanks for your attention! I apologize if this is not the right place to post this, mods feel free to remove if necessary.
This was what I was thinking. Vectoring the continents takes a bit of time, but it’s pretty fun, actually. I want to get some iris details in there, but would also like a bit of feedback from the community.
If you already have something else, that’s good as well. I honestly am having fun making this and I needed to get back into vector art anyway.
Thanks for your work and interest! 😁 There are already two open PR, so thanks to the amazing community, I quickly got from the situation of having no choices to choosing from several alternatives.
I really love the idea of the eye’s pupil being represented by the globe in your proposal. It evokes in me the feeling of all the glamorous world being perceived through one’s eyes, all the stunning beauty that can be brought to a human only through vision. Which is exactly what I want to achieve with my app, bringing to people the world which can be experienced only through the eyesight.
However, I think the app icon is actually too small space for this. You know, people have gazillion apps installed, the icons become super-tiny, the Earth would be barely recognizable and it wouldn’t communicate the idea. I think a much better place for this would be the project’s graphical banner, which is much larger, and serves exactly the purpose of communicating the app’s purpose through interesting graphics. Play store definitely does have this, and I think f-Droid too. I usually put some non-sense there, because I’m lazy to look for something proper. But if you’re in a drawing mood and feel inspired, I believe my project could absolutely utilize your work! 😉
I agree with you on that point. I got overly ambitious and have always wondered about making my own icon pack. When you do release, you should reach out to Delta icons in F-Droid and see if you can get your app requested! Everone gets one app request for free, and the project is completely free and open source.
I’ll post a finished product when it’s done if you want to use it anywhere. You can freely have it and license it under your project if you wish. I’ll try to finish it by tomorrow, and in the meantime if you have any other requests for art that you need, do not hesitate to ask. I think this is an amazing idea, and honestly could see other utilization for it.
For example, a color naming tool for the colorblind. With the way AI is, it could present examples of things of that color. For example, a lime green could show a tennis ball, bright grass, and other such samples. Could possibly used in aiding colorblind individuals in painting or digital art (though the paintings that come from a fully colorblind artist are wild and really cool when they just pick from the grays that look good to them).