AirBud

Landing Page
Info Page
Two Player Game
Flappy Plane
Chat Page
Home Page

Inspiration

We wanted to improve the inflight experience on AA flights and resolve user complaints about the mobile app. When taking long-haul flights, people are often very bored, so Airbud provides ways for people to meet each other, play games, and get important travel information.

What it does

It starts with a simple sentence of the day, where you are flying to, from where, and the time of your flight. After that is done, we handle the rest. We have all of your flight details and you have everything you can ask for at the tips of your fingers. There are games to play, flight assistance chat, and the ability to connect with people near you or throughout the entire plane. These games are meant to help you break the barrier between the people around you and make those strangers your new friends! In case you were flying spontaneously, curious about the movies (recommendations) and snacks (health concerns or prices), or want to get realtime information about your destination, you can easily access all of that information! And last but not least, if you are separated from your friends and family, you can use the chat functionality to talk to them! The main goal was to make the inflight experience as productive and enjoyable as possible and to bring people together.

How we built it

It started with the setup of the react-native expo environment. From there, we had to make sure everything was working on our phones and that our code changes would live update to our phones. After that, our entire team broke up into our expertise area. Adi started with the development of the games, specifically Flappy Plane! Akshay started designing the app itself and came up with the fantastic color scheme. Aayush worked on the first Natural Language Processing step to gather all of the data from a simple sentence. Monte started with the data gathering and processing. After that, we all started combining our components. Akshay started building the other game to chat with people near you and Aayush started working on the public chat! After scraping data from the American Airlines website, Monte started on the retrieval augmented generation implementation with the LLM. Adi implemented the Flappy Plane game and also started doing some design on the app. After that, we all combined our parts again to create our final product!

Challenges we ran into

Learning typescript in a short amount of time was difficult. It was new for all of us so understanding syntax and how to make it compatible with javascript proved to be a challenge. Setting up the Expo environment proved to be difficult as well, due to the wifi settings that needed to be changed and having to configure each laptop to run the server on its local IP if there are any REST API Calls. That was probably the most time-consuming task, but good to know for the future. After that, we mainly struggled with implementing the UI with react-native and adding designs.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are all very proud of our finished product, we were able to create the product we envisioned. Additionally, we had the opportunity to learn new technologies in the process and we can all definitely carry this forward!

What we learned

We learned a lot from this experience, this was the first time developing a mobile app using react-native for all of us so there were some bumps in the road but we were able to learn from all of our mistakes and make a finished product that we are proud of. This also taught us the importance of building something to solve a genuine problem and helped us realize we can actually make a good product!

What's next for Airbud

We hope to integrate this with American Airlines' inflight entertainment wifi. With our app being connected to flights we would be able to test and receive feedback from users and know what aspects of the project we need to improve. We genuinely believe that the tools we have built today can make a big impact for American Airlines!