Inspiration
Obesity and lack of participation in daily events has prevented children from fully experiencing the world around them. Lets be real, Pokemon Go may have started off with 9.5 million daily users but there are still 64 million other children who have not yet been active in the world around them. Introducing Beacon, an app which will help the user actively walk around cities and surrounding areas by locating events based on their personal interest and location. The purpose of this app is to allow for the user to get an immersive visual feel with less text and more images and have a more interactive experience with the app.
What it does
Users will be able to anonymously create events and post photos, notifying others nearby. We have also used an API which prevents inappropriate events/photos from being posted along with another API which uses Sentimental analysis to make sure tags remain neutral or positive, to prevent spam and bullying as our defensive approach to this app. The app makes profit by offering the option for venues to pay a monthly fee in exchange for advertising in the form of their location constantly being displayed as a "Beacon", along with allowing the owner to moderate and post pictures to their own location as they like. For business growth and profit, we are planning to utilize our business feature which allows for certain events to be paid for by a monthly fee. The benefit would be free advertising whenever a user walks near the businesses' sponsored event and getting notifications of that specific event. Each "Beacon", whether business sponsored or not, can have numerous images with each one having tags the user can specify, and the user can receive a custom feed sorted based on tags they like.
How we built it
We built the backend using a Java server and mariadb mysql database which handled images. The front end was created using android and design was done using sketch. To provide a safety measure, we used multiple APIs which were sentimental analysis and the Vision API provided by Google Cloud Platform which made sure that images were not inappropriate and events were not spam.
Challenges we ran into
The server was a tedious task which we built using Java and setting up the SQL Database gave us some annoying errors.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
With future development, we will be able to make this app a business with potential for profits and potential to change the world. Allowing for visual events to be detected within the user's radius while these images/events have tags which the user could set in their own preferences.
What we learned
We were able to learn how to use Java to manage our backend server along with creating an android app that used multiple libraries and APIs.
What's next for Beacon
In the future, premium users can set the time of how long their event will be featured on the map (ranging from 0-48 hours) which can differentiate them from the sponsored events which are displayed for the whole month and are significantly larger.
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