Inspiration
- As first-year students, we have experienced the difficulties of navigating our way around our new home. We wanted to facilitate the transition to university by helping students learn more about their university campus.
What Is It?
- A social media app for students to share daily images of their campus and earn points by accurately guessing the locations of their friend's image. After guessing, students can explore the location in full with detailed maps, including within university buildings.
How We Built It
- Mapped-in SDK was used to display user locations in relation to surrounding buildings and help identify different campus areas. Reactjs was used as a mobile website as the SDK was unavailable for mobile. Express and Node for backend, and MongoDB Atlas serves as the backend for flexible datatypes.
Challenges We Ran Into
- Developing in an unfamiliar framework (React) after learning that Android Studio was not feasible
- Bypassing CORS permissions when accessing the user's camera
Accomplishments That We're Proud Of
- Using a new SDK purposely to address an issue that was relevant to our team
- Going through the development process, and gaining a range of experiences over a short period of time
What We Learned
- Planning time effectively and redirecting our goals accordingly
- How to learn by collaborating with team members to SDK experts, as well as reading documentation.
- Our tech stack
What's Next?
- Creating more social elements, such as a global leaderboard/tournaments to increase engagement beyond first years
- Considering extra components, such as extra guesses, status indicators, and interpersonal wagers
- Showcasing 360-panoramas in 'AR' by stitching together a video recording from the user
- Addressing privacy concerns with image face blur and an option for delaying showing the image
- Adding extra points by going to the location physically to make a guess, where time and steps factor into the number of points won
Testing
- Login using the username "NamanB" and the password "123" (don't input the quotations) to try out the app