Nauly

Inspiration

The inspiration comes from individuals with lower spatial orientation, or people simply struggling to navigate from point A to B on a regular basis.

What it does

Our product allows users to navigate as they would over the phone with a location-savvy friend, allowing them to build spatial cognition from not only street names and directions, but with surrounding buildings, etc.

How we built it

We separated the development process into three components:

Product design
Gumloop exploration and usage
Frontend vibe coding

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest challenge was bridging the "Geometry vs. Reality" gap to tell us what landmarks and points of reference are at the important intersections of a route. We had to engineer a multi-step logic chain in Gumloop that takes route coordinates and associates it to the most relevant and noticeable landmarks using the Google Places API.

Additionally, we had to force an LLM to act as a strict backend API because we wanted the instructions to be as clear and concise as possible. However, hallucinations and conversational filler from the LLM made us spend a significant amount of time revising our system prompts.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of having build a "Wrapper" layer on top of Google Maps that translates raw data into human context.

We are also proud of the "Vibe Coding" approach to the frontend since it saved us a lot of time that was extremely valuable for the completion of the other tasks during this 24 hour hackathon.

What we learned

We learned that navigation is more psychological than technical as numbers are an abstract concept whereas concrete directives provide relief.

We also learned the power of "low-code orchestration". We used Gumloop to handle the heavy lifting of API chaining, reasoning and transcription so that we could focus our efforts on the user experience.

What's next for Nauly

The immediate next step is periodic relocation and tracking to make sure the user stays on the route and to offer additional support in the event of external circumstances.

In the long term, we envision Nauly as a personal partner which doesn't just know where the landmarks are but also remembers which landmarks are the easiest to recognize by the users. Using known anchors for future navigation is the best way to ensure the success of the project.