Inspiration
In 2022, UCL has reached a record number of students -- approximately 50'000 -- and doesn't have the necessary space to accommodate for all of them. As such, many areas on campus are overcrowded, which can be frustrating for some and overwhelming for others. Students aren't aware of all of the different locations on campus, so they only flock to the popular locations, thus unnecessarily creating large crowds of students.
What it does
UCL Crowd Control gives students access to a web application which shows a bird's eye view of UCL, displaying the density of students at certain areas as well as café and restaurant locations on campus (e.g., UCL Print Café). This allows students to navigate towards more sparse areas, thus dispersing students around campus and helping alleviate the overcrowing problem at hand.
How we built it
Using the UCL API for student density collection, the OpenLayers JavaScript library for display on an interactive map, and Flask for server-side functionality, we built a full-stack web application. This consisted of splitting backend and frontend tasks among students.
Challenges we ran into
In terms of the UCL API, the survey sensors for workspaces still contain outdated data (Bidborough House - Social Distancing), which we had to have our program constantly remove when iterating through response data. Furthermore, the OpenLayers library documentation was difficult to navigate, and had several different types of documentation for different Node.js and OpenLayers versions, without actually clarifying the version. This lead to many version conflicts in code, which took a lot of time and effort to resolve.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We managed to create a fully-functional heatmap as well as implement a completely library and API that we were not familiar with previously in less than 24h.
What we learned
If you can avoid JavaScript, don't touch it. We learned to navigate through a new library quickly and efficiently, only collecting what information we truly needed. We also hope that the UCL API's legacy flaws get fixed in the future.
What's next for Crowd Control
We hope to implement different café locations and add students' reviews for various locations. Adding guides for different stations to go to for commutes would also be quite helpful to regulate crowd movement around UCL.
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