Block-Chat

Chat in your BLOCK!

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Inspiration

Though everyone has a mobile phone, not everyone uses the same IM app and not everyone wants to trust a new company. Here we ship out with a fully secure, anonymous, painless IM app that does all the things automatically for you-- the only thing required on your side is to open the link and chat with people around you!

What it does

BlockChat is a location-based social application aimed at fast and login free chatting. The chat room is automatically set up based on locations of users. One can chat with nearby users at any time, asking about the way or just sharing their joy. With the help of Machine Learning, BlockChat can draw chat bubbles of different colors based on the emotion of the message sender. It can also add proper descriptions for the images sent by users. Since BlockChat does not store histories on the server, it's a safe and traceless, which provides a more casual chatting environment for the users.

How we built it

The target platform is Web, as well as PWA on android devices. We use Vue.js as the front-end framework and node js as the backend server so that we can share some of the code. For real-time chatting, we use socket.io to efficiently share the messages among all the online clients. We integrated Microsoft Cognitive Service into our chat room -- automatically analyze the emotion of each message and display them using different colors. We use stdlib to do image preprocess and integrate MS cognitive service with it to provide excellent image service.

Challenges we ran into

Limited time is the largest challenge. we need to discuss even debate about what we want to do and then realize it in only 24 hours. It takes some effort to develop our very progressive model that is our location-based chat web APP BlockChat. Secondly, we have used a lot of modern developing tools such as serverless, WebSocket and pwa. Since most of these tools haven't been available for a long period of time, we are not sufficiently familiar with their interfaces and usages. Therefore, we spend some time learning them. Finally, hackathon is really a tough competition. It happened that we were extremely tired after coding for several hours but still are struggling to finish in time. Having gone through all those challenges, we gained precious experience and really enjoy these time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  1. Real-time chat.
  2. Login-free location-based chat rooms.
  3. We use.
  4. Automatically add descriptions for images.
  5. fast and responsive frontend
  6. stunning animations:)

What we learned

A hackathon is a good opportunity for everyone to learn something. Our goal is to build up a web application which makes social communication happen at any time and anywhere, where users can set up and enter chat rooms as they want. We learned how to design the user interface and functionality. In the hackathon, none of us are experts and we learned and practiced at the same time. It was also a fascinating adventure to try all kinds of open source API provided by a different company to realize some cool stuff. Most importantly, we learned how creative and productive we actually are, in 24 hours.

What's next for Block-Chat

Sleep and have a good weekend. We wish to refactor some part of the code since some of it is hard-coded due to limited time. Now we have a better understanding of our idea, we realize the original idea was a sudden impulse.

The Team

wooooow

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