Bundle

Our mission
Features
Tech stacks

Inspiration

Mental health has always been a serious concern for people world wide, and as college students, this problem is especially relevant. Because of this, we wanted to create an app that helps make an impact in your circles. So many current apps are targeted towards meeting new people, moreso romantically but also platonically: Tinder, Bumble, and Grindr to name a few. However, sometimes it’s more meaningful to keep in touch with your old friends. This is where Bundle comes into play!

What it does

The main functionality is keeping in touch with your friends quickly. One can make groups where each person updates their status using a range of moods, and you can even send quick video messages or quick gifs/stickers. There are also daily questions that pose for self reflection, and you can view everyone else's answers after submitting your own. Finally, you can send NFTs for special occasions to spice up gifts and keep things quick and digitized, Bundle's mission.

How we built it

We built the server backend using Flask storing user information, generating questions, and saving videos with a restful database. For the app backend, we built it using Node.JS, using libraries such as Express for handling HTTP protocols, socketIO for listening for daily questions, and node-blob for processing videos. We utilized Javascript to then script up the webcam and store the video for the short video messages, and then we utilized HTML/CSS to code up the frontend.

Challenges we ran into

We had some initial challenges in just moving elements into positions we wanted. We also had video record issues with audio, in which we needed to work around audio states to get the desired functionality. Finally, uploading video files from frontend to the backend server proved to be a difficult challenge as we were limited by the files were too big to be directly transferred between the app frontend and backend.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're pretty proud of building a full stack app and being able to produce a functioning application in the short time span. We learned a lot of new libraries simply in the moment—for example, none of us knew node.js prior to this hackathon, and we certainly never utilized the MediaStream Recording API either for Javascript. We had an idea and executed to it, which we are all happy about.

What we learned

In the end, we learned a lot of different frameworks and also worked around difficulties. Some of our members were less experienced than others in terms of coding, so we learned to collaborate more efficiently and make the most out of everyone's strengths. We did our best to plan out our project schedule based on what each person could do, and we found out that this was quite intensive.

What's next for Bundle

Currently, you can only send your friends NFTs that already exist. In the future, we want to make it so you can mint & send your friend a custom NFT. Additionally, it could be fun to have short mini-games to play between your friends if both are online. One idea we had was mining a blockchain together. but in a cute mini-game way to go along with our NFT-themed gifts. We also would like to implement a tracker on each contact for how long it's been since you last saw / interacted with them. One final idea was adding private statistics so you can look at some big data—how much likes you send per month, who you most frequently interact with, and average mood over a period of time.