Attention Tracker

Seeks to solve short attention spans by tracking how often a user switches Youtube videos and incorporating a brief dopamine detox through a tense, drawn out, western standoff.

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Inspiration

Our project was heavily inspired by the dramatic and tense western standoffs seen in movies. A one-on-one duel which tests an individual's focus, reflexes, and control. We attempted to implement these elements of a traditional western standoff into our program to combat the shortening attention spans caused by fast paced media consumption.

What it does

The Attention Tracker is a chrome extension which monitors the percentage of a video watched before clicking off. If the user clicks off the video without having first watched 10 percent of the video, then the extension marks a instance of low attention span and a flag is generated. Three flags forces the user into a tense western standoff where they are forced to react to a 0.5 second interval randomly occurring within a long and random time period. This built in game not only acts as a short dopamine detox from their fast paced swapping of Youtube videos, but also encourages the habit of slowing down their rate of media consumption. To assist in this, a report tab has been added below the flag counter which includes statistics about the user's attention span.

How we built it

The attention tracker was built as part of a 3 man team utilizing manual coding in addition to AI.

Challenges we ran into

The primary challenge in implementing our idea was connecting the western standoff game we had created with the chrome extension which tracked the user's Youtube attention span. Other notable challenges we solved were preventing the user from bypassing the dopamine detox by refreshing the game and creating an extension to measure how much of a Youtube video was watched.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our group is very proud of creating a chrome application/extension that seamlessly incorporates into the Youtube watching experience while successfully accomplishing our initial vision for the project.

What we learned

I believe some things we learned through this Hackathon project are how to use AI to enhance our coding abilities; how to connect code across different environments and languages; how to request certain information from a webpage such as video length and minutes watched; and how to create a friendly user interface.

What's next for Attention Tracker

First we want add more customizability to our Attention Tracker so that users can easily modify the program to better fit their reaction time and expected attention spans. Second we want to expand our Attention Tracker to other environments such as Instagram reels, Youtube shorts, or TikTok to help fix attention spans for users who don't primarily use Youtube as their source of media.

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