Discover NYC

Inspiration

When we came to Columbia this year as freshmen, we wanted to explore NYC. But, we often had a hard time deciding where to go because we didn't know which places were tourist traps and which places were ones that locals frequented and enjoyed. There are thousands of POIs (points of interest) in NYC, and we wanted a way to determine which ones are actually worth it.

What it does

Explore NYC is an augmented reality app that draws from the Twitter and Google Maps APIs. Using the Google Maps API, we get the user's location and where they are facing to determine what POIs are in their line of sight. We display the results on the user's screen as location pins. Using the Twitter API, we search for unique Tweets containing the POI as a phrase. We perform sentiment analysis on the Tweets using Python and TextBlob to get the percentage of positive sentiment Tweets. Users can click on and expand the location pins to view the positive sentiment percentage for each Tweet, along with positive sentiment and negative sentiment trends over time.

How we built it

We are beginners and weren't sure which platforms would be best, so we tried many different things including Python, Echo3D, and other AR app building platforms. Ultimately, we decided to create a Figma prototype as our MVP.

Challenges we ran into

We had no experience with AR apps or working with APIs and had to learn everything from scratch. Our biggest challenge was integrating all the things we learned together into an actual app.