Inspiration
To us, "When worlds collide" isn't just about collisions in space; it also means travelling around the world and experiencing other countries' cultures, as each culture can be seen as its own world filled with different food, music and a way of living. When we saw the challenge Booking.com put out to help everyone experience the world, we knew that we had to make something related to helping people travel, get outside and "collide" with these cultures.
That's when we came up with our idea to make a travel itinerary planner to help users plan what to do when they go on holiday. If the user had no idea where to go, we wanted to integrate a travel-related AI chatbot to help the user decide where to go based on budget, and once they decided, that information would be used to create an itinerary for them.
What it does
The web app allows the user to input details of their holiday - where they are travelling to, their budget and how many people are going along with them. This information is then passed into an API, which searches for places nearby to visit, such as restaurants and even hotels, if the user hasn't already booked one. it also displays useful information such as the nearest pharmacy and hospital if the worst were to happen.
How we built it
Using Google Firebase BaaS to host the website and Flutter's frontend framework with material 3 for our UI. OpenRouter to communicate with our Open AI LLM, which is used alongside Google Maps Places API to discover restaurants and attractions in the nearby area. Gemini API to create a travel-related AI chatbot.
Challenges we ran into
Flutters' frontend framework had issues with our original Python script we created to retrieve restaurants and attractions with Google Maps Places API, so we had to replace it with an NPM server backend for that one function so it would run properly.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
A lot of our frameworks and platforms we used were brand new to us. None of us had ever used Flutter, and we had to navigate the extra steps of using Flutterfire to set up communication from our Flutter web app to Firebase in a short time.
What we learned
Teamwork makes the dream work. Using openrouter to combine different AI APIs. Flutter is quite limited in its capabilities for websites as we had to expand and use NPM.
What's next for Continent Collider
Expanding out to road trips and different modes of transport (Ferries) which are a lot more budget friendly. Looking into more local towns that dont get as much tourism. Expanding into live events and helping people plan concert holidays.
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