Buddio

Gamify your in-person meetups for social hangouts, group projects and assignments!

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Inspiration

Oftentimes, collaboration in group projects and social gatherings are hindered by poor participation and lack of engagement. Ever had a group project where everyone worked solo, barely meeting up until the project completion? Ever had a friend that just kept "disappearing" from the outings? Unsurprisingly, in-person collaboration and meetings are often more productive than online. That's because it keeps them engaged and connected with their team! The average human attention span is estimated to be around 8.25 seconds, and without social engagement, it results in poor communication and teamwork, leading to worse academic performance and bridge-burning friendships!

We understand that meeting up in person can be a tedious task. As students, a constant problem we experience with group projects and hangouts is that some people deliberately choose to be absent, perhaps due to social anxiety or simply a lack of motivation. Buddio intends to solve this problem by gamifying your in-person meetups with automation! Simplicity is one of our key features—just snap and upload a photo, and let our website do the rest!

Whether you're a project lead—or even just a friend, Buddio is for you! Us students always want full participation in group meetings and gatherings. Rather than sitting there and hoping everyone allocates themselves properly, Buddio acts as your participation tracker and self-accountability partner.

Simply put, Buddio utilises facial recognition to track appearances of group members within photos, and displays them on a dynamic leaderboard. Our advanced data algorithms also generate a 3D Collaboration Graph, visually mapping connections between members to enhance teamwork. It's more than just an participation tracker—it’s your ultimate engagement companion!

One of our standout features is anti-spoofing. To ensure authenticity, we've removed the Upload button for capturing group photos, only permitting you to capture photos only in real time on our website. This prevents users from uploading outdated images taken days or even weeks earlier, guaranteeing accurate attendance tracking!

Buddio keeps your team engaged and accountable by making meetups more fun and rewarding. Whether it's a study session or a casual hangout, Buddio turns group work into more than just a shared deadline—it becomes a social experience where everyone feels involved, connected, and recognized!

What it does

Say hello to Buddio - your ultimate group project/friend group companion!

By combining participation tracking, task organisation and gamification into one seamless platform, team collaboration can be transformed into more engaging and accountable sessions.

Seamless Participation tracking with OpenCV😎

  • Create a project on Buddio platform and invite team members
  • Snap a photo for each time your group meets up
  • Buddio’s facial recognition (OpenCV) will verify Participation
  • Each attending member earns +1 point on the leaderboard - the more you show up the higher you rank!
  • Memory lane timeline: all uploaded photo will be stored in a visual timeline, letting teams look back on their collaborative journey 🗓️

3D Visual Collaboration Map 🌐

  • Each team member is a node, and connections (edges) are formed when they collaborate
  • How strong your connection is (or rather how many times have you appeared with friend X or friend Y) is visually represented by the thickness of the edges between nodes.
  • The more times you’ve appeared together the thicker the edge between you guys
  • If members never work together (never show up together) they remain disconnected

Task Management & Productivity Boost📌

  • Stay organise with interactive Kanban board to track progress
  • Plan effectively with integrated calendar to set task to do

Receipt Scanner with Tesseract.js 🧾

  • Uploading or scanning the receipt
  • The platform uses Tesseract.js to extract text and itemize expenses
  • Buddio will then automatically split the amount among the team members, making cost-sharing effortless!
  • Members can also adjust individual contribution if needed

How we built it

Prototyping 🎨

In our journey of developing Buddio, we continuously refine our vision of a platform that integrates team collaboration/meetups. The name Buddio embodies the spirit of collaboration, companion and biometrics, which aligns with our goal. After thorough discussion we decided on our general idea of how our platform should look like. We started by using the online Figma tool to visualise and refine our vision. This helped us solidify Buddio’s core feature and overall design

Development 🛠️

In the end we decided on:

Frontend:

  • Nextjs
  • React Force 3D for Collaboration Network 🌐

Backend:

  • FastApi for handling api
  • Firebase for database management
  • OpenCV for facial recognition 😶
  • Tesseract.js for OCR & expenses splitting 🧾

Challenges we ran into

During our brainstorm phase, we knew we wanted to focus on team collaboration projects, but found it hard to find the right approach. Our first idea was a teacher focused attendance system using OpenCV, where the educators could take attendance automatically. However, this idea felt too rigid. It lacked flexibility and it really lacked uniqueness and creativity.

Next, we explored a gamified plant-care system, where students need to attend classes to keep the virtual plant healthy. Even though we introduce an interactive element, it still seems a little too restrictive as we only focus on class attendance rather than true team collaboration.

In the end we landed on Buddio, which includes the participation tracker (a more apt word) that we wanted but also balances flexibility and teamwork. The best part? Members get to compete to see who participates the most! Making collaboration both fun and productive.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We successfully built a working photo-based participation tracking system that integrates seamlessly with the leaderboard and Kanban board. Not only were we able to make it work, it actually looks good too!

The 3D collaboration network was a major accomplishment too! You can visually see the connection between each member whether the connection is strong or not. This really was the “WOW” factor of Buddio, setting it apart with a distinctive and interactive approach.

Watching Buddio slowly evolve from an idea to a fully functional platform was an incredibly rewarding experience. Seeing each feature come together one by one made all the effort worth it. This journey was intense but it pushed us to learn new things and collaborate in ways we never expected. It is not merely just a project for us, it is a valuable experience and memory that will stay with us long after the journey ends.

What we learned

Brainstorming ideas We learned that the ideation phase is extremely crucial. It took us multiple iterations to find a concept that not only meets all our goals but also maintains our uniqueness. We realise the significance of exploring different directions to refine our idea and always keep an open mind to let creativity “flow in”.

Delegating task Effective and efficient teamwork requires clear delegation and mutual trust between each other’s strength. We first break down our project into manageable parts, ensuring that everyone has a role and doing what they are best at. This ensures that everyone has a role and contributes to the final product. We also create milestones to complete to keep our vision aligned.

What's next for Buddio

As we look ahead, we aim to expand Buddio’s capability and features. One key feature is using OCR where the members can put their timetable in and the platform will generate when’s the best possible time for meetings or meetups, this will make scheduling much more easier and also streamline the planning process.

We also want to include a feature where task allocation is driven by AI(DeepSeek). Buddio could suggest optimal tasks for each member according to their strengths, workload and personality traits by using personality assessment and past contributions.

Finally to motivate the members, we plan to introduce a streak-based reward or badges for something like most consistent participation. And we can have collaboration challenges when taking photos such as “make an ugly face” to encourage engagement and friendly competition.

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