echos of the past

Inspiration

Did you know that there are 2,200 registered heritage buildings in Vancouver?

Walking down the same streets that we walk down every day, we often don’t notice the buildings and places that have been there for as long as we can remember. However, there is history everywhere, all around us, every day.

Echos of the Past is a web app that allows people to learn, explore, and connect with their community. Specifically, this app is geared toward young adults who were unable to interact with their city during the pandemic. This web app is a fun way for them to explore their surroundings while encouraging exercise and learning.

Through this web app, people can access a list of recommendations of locations with niche and historical significance, helping them to develop a stronger social engagement with their city and its history. People are then able to interactively engage with their surrounding community and learn more about local places through 3 manners.

First, a short blurb is generated with the Mediawiki and Co:here API to give users a summary of the location and its historical roots. Secondly, a map and address are gathered using Geolocation API so that users can physically go to the location and explore. Lastly, a Spotify playlist is recommended based on sentient analysis of the summary, which allows people to be fully immersed in the experience of exploring history.

What it does

People are asked to provide information about their location in one of two ways. First, they can choose to manually input their location and based on this input, a list of recommended places to visit is generated. Users can choose to explore any location (generated by the Geolocation API) on the list by reading the short historical summary (generated using Co:here and Mediawiki), along with a list of recommended songs from Spotify (based on sentient analysis of the text).

In the second option, users can choose to have their location data automatically tracked. This allows them to have a more exploratory rather than investigative experience. Users are asked for their phone numbers, which are used by the web app to periodically send informative texts about nearby locations to visit. Similar to the first option, each text message will contain a short summary of the places’ historical significance, along with a link to a Spotify playlist. Users can choose to opt out of text messages at any time by texting “STOP,” which will also stop sharing their location.

How we built it

Our prototype and wireframe were created using Figma. We used React and Node.js for our front-end framework. Using the Mediawiki and Co:here API, we gathered and summarized Wikipedia pages about local places of interest. With the Geolocation API, the user’s location can be pinpointed and used to find nearby landmarks of historical significance and in real-time. We also incorporated Spotify API to generate song recommendations based on the locations people may be interested in.

Challenges we ran into

Half of our team are first-time hackers and they learned a lot about working under time pressure and navigating an intense work environment. In addition, we used several new software APIs, such as Co:here, Mediawiki, Geolocation and Spotify API.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our team is proud of how we were able to integrate most of the APIs that we wanted. In addition, we are quite happy with our Figma design and prototype, since we initially had a lot of issues with using the software.

What we learned

Due to time constraints, we weren’t able to realize all the functions that we wanted. However, we were able to pivot and create the functions that are the most important for our program. We learned that although being ambitious is good, it is also good to have alternative plans in case things don’t go the way that we want or expect.

What's next for Echos of the Past

The next step for Echos of the Past is to integrate functions that we were unable to complete today. First and most importantly, we want to integrate the backend of the GoogleMaps API, which will allow us to track and use users’ locations to generate lists of interests. Secondly, we want to further finetune the design of the actual front end. This will involve further editing the CSS to align more with our Figma prototype. Lastly, we were only able to complete the first option, the input location option of the web app. A further direction would be to introduce the on-the-go version of the app. Text messaging services will involve other software such as Twilio.