AroundU

Inspiration

This year's Durhack competition revolves around exploration. We decided to embody this by creating a website that encourages users to explore their surroundings.

What it does

By default, each user starts with a greyed out map of the world. This website is meant to encourage users to walk, jog, ski, ride a horse, or any other method of transportation, so that they can explore more. Furthermore, the use of AI generated quests gives users more to do at a given point of interest.

How we built it

Firstly, we collaboratively pitched project ideas until we eventually settled for AroundU. We split the tasks in accordance with our skill level, in order to permit all members of the team to participate. Furthermore, in order to progress on the code as efficiently as possible, we made sure to use platforms such as GitHub for version control and FireBase for cloud storage.

Challenges we ran into

Our website is currently hosted locally on a laptop, so leaving the premises sometimes causes the connection to drop, and therefore causing coordinates not being saved.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The app is resource efficient by only updating coordinates when necessary, removing the need to unecessary post requests to FireBase.

What we learned

Learnt lots about collaboration, since this is our first time participating in a hackathon together. Getting the hang of GitHub and FireBase on the spot was a big challenge, but we all feel that this has been of great use.