In Jan 2019 ISMAANA member Shri Piyush Dutta established an Innovation Prize of $1500 per year to be awarded to an IIT(ISM) undergraduate student/ team of students who come up with the best idea of building a patentable product. The product prototype had to be built and demonstrated to show that it worked. In October 2021 Shri Piyush Dutta further expanded this Innovation Prize. It was expended to each of the four undergraduate year students. The prize money was expanded to $3000. Each year students have different requirements with varying winning prize amounts.

For the year 2021, IIT(ISM) has selected a team of two fourth year students “Saswata Som and Shweta Kumar”. These students will share the prize amount of $1,500. The following describes the award-winning project. ISMAANA is thankful to Shri Piyush Dutta in setting up these awards, thus challenging the IIT(ISM) students to work on innovative ideas and projects.

Title of the Idea: minAR

While being one of the most important and earliest established professions, mining remains a mystery to most laymen. Even students studying this discipline face difficulty grasping the concepts, due to its vast size as well as difficulty in accessing mines and mine equipment for study. The mines are dangerous for inexperienced people to visit unsupervised, and the mine equipment are dangerous to handle for untrained people as well. This is a problem we are trying to overcome through our solution.
The title of our project is minAR and it combines mining and advancement in technologies such as Augmented Reality to present a solution that will help students and laymen, as well as professionals to visualize and learn more about mining from the comfort of their homes. We have developed a 2-part solution (consisting of an android application and a website) which
combined, provides users with features like:

• Mine walkthrough: Walk the inside of a mine from home.
• Mine Equipment tutorials: Learn about different mine equipment by visualizing them in 3D
• Mine block model visualization: See mine block models in real 3D simulation judging ore grades easily Using our application is very convenient as well as easy for students. What we vision is every student having the application on their mobile phones. Professors can guide students through the inside of a mine while explaining everything through a virtual tour in VR. Students can also learn more about equipment such as haul and dump trucks, as well as their components, by seeing them in Augmented reality in their own rooms. They can move around studying different features of the equipment. These models must be uploaded on our website. The app also contains the components, also visible in AR, as well as the different circuits used inside the equipment. Users can also view the block models of mines, which can previously be made in mine planning software such as Surpac, and then uploaded through our website. The website also provides features such as news about recent mine related incidents, as well as an interactive quiz section. So, our solution is basically a one stop learning platform for mine related topics.

The solution is novel because it provides following features:

• Portable: Previous virtual tour of the places had to be done using costly headgears which are not affordable or readily available to everyone. Using smartphones anyone can do it because everyone has a smartphone nowadays
• Repeatability: Unlike physical visits, students can visit a mine as many times as they like
• Experience: Before handling dangerous equipment in real life, they can do so virtually and learn all precautions
• Immersive Visualization: Students can see preexisting mines and interact with objects easily