COSine: Coming Out Simulator

Coming Out Simulator: For Queer individuals interested in exploring how to come out in a safe environment with curated resources and allies looking to understand lived experiences of LGBTQ+ people.

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Inspiration

Roleplaying games, and our own experiences as queer youth. We hope for this project both to be a place for other queer youth to seek help and resources and for allies to experience how coming out feels in different situations. Hopefully, in the future, we can make the storyline and AI's actions more and more realistic, in order to give a better representation of queer experiences.

What it does

Currently, there is an initial storyline that the user must read through first. After the story starts the sandbox, where the user can send messages and ChatGPT will roleplay as a loving parent. There are also some resources in the sidebar that we hope to expand upon.

How we built it

We initially used HTML/CSS to code the UI and nodejs to integrate the AI. Later on, we wanted to move the entire project to React and made good progress on that. However, there wasn't sufficient time to finish that version so the demo uses the original version.

Challenges we ran into

We had a lot of issues with formatting and integration of the AI. Additionally, there were a lot of ideas we had that we couldn't implement due to time constraints and our own inexperience with reactjs meant a lot of frustration when we tried to remake our entire project with it. We also ran into a minor issue with needing to pay for the ChatGPT API so the user has to provide their own key to use the AI sandbox.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I think it's amazing we managed to at least finish a semi-useable product in such a short timeframe. Since our team members are all very busy, it was a struggle to find times when we could work together, and each of us had a hard time finding time to work hard on our project. It's great that, given all that, we were still able to deliver what we did.

What we learned

We learned a lot about project management and about coding in general. We all went into this knowing nothing about reactjs, and came out (haha) with at least some experience in using it in a project. We also learned to compromise on cool new ideas in order to better focus on executing our basic ideas.

What's next for COSine

We hope to improve the project a lot. We wanted to add different AI personalities for different people–mother, father, friends, relatives, etc. We also wanted to add different AI personalities for different identities since the experience of someone coming out as, say, bisexual would not be the same as someone coming out as trans. Additionally, the resources could be more extensive and well-organized so as to better help LGTBQ youth. We have a lot of similar ideas, and hope to implement all of them into this project as we gain more experience and knowledge.

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