Beside

Inspiration

Our idea begins with the fact that travelers leave their own messages in scenery places. Why don’t we create an AR function that displays these messages whenever other travelers open their phones? We then extend our target to every person who wants a platform to share their current feelings with people who have experienced the same place or event. Thus Beside is created, aiming to connect you with people who have been “beside” you in the past and present.

Functionality

Our application has two main features. From the AR environment, people can view all the messages written by users who have been to the same location, presented in 3D objects. The user can interact with others through browsing the notes, leaving comments, and posting notes themselves. No matter it is a food recommendation, a random rant, or a meaningful story, you can share them with people throughout the world who pass by the same location. In the map feature, a collection of all notes written in a certain area would be represented, and top-trending topics would be visible on the map. The user can participate in discussions in other areas while getting informed of the trend.

Challenges & Achievements

We divided our team into two groups, an AR group, and a map group. Without any prior experience in swift, AR development, or front-end development, we spent a challenging and meaningful day learning from the basics to advanced functions using unfamiliar languages. The main problems the AR groups tackled is rendering 3D notes, correcting directions of the notes, and modeling the notes. We successfully adjusted the note directions by adding an interactive tap function that rotates the notes. As for the map interface, the first major challenge we encountered was the technical specifics of react.js. Since we are all beginner hackers and have no experience in react.js or JavaScript in general, it is really hard to understand and master the syntax and concept behind the language/framework. An example of such challenges is the objects in JavaScript, which is completely different from Java, which we are more comfortable with. The second challenge is that when we try to make some API calls of ‘google-map-react’, the official documentation is a little bit ambiguous that we have to dig into the source code and try to understand how to use the APIs.The third problem is that during the early implementation stage of the project, we don’t have sufficient reliable data to run a comprehensive test as we develop it. We had to come up with some simple test data in order to test and debug.

Future Plans

As our project is still in the prototype stage, we plan on completing the functions that we envisioned in the future, such as posting and commenting on posts. If we can successfully develop the product, we hope to promote our application among Berkeley students and take the first step in launching a real AR driven social platform.