Eventuality

Inspiration

All of us work in Event and Classroom Management at the University of Rochester — the department that handles everything from scheduling events and supporting academic classes to random things like fixing printers. We noticed that the most common way people promote events is by putting up tons of flyers. By the end of the semester, the bulletin boards are overflowing with old, irrelevant posters that no one looks at anymore. They’re messy, a fire hazard, and honestly make people less interested in reading them.

What it does

To fix this, we came up with a simple but solid idea: digitalize on-campus event promotion. Eventuality gives students an easy, clean interface to discover events, and it helps organizers actually reach the students they want. You can swipe right on an event to instantly add it to your calendar. Anyone can upload posters, and the app uses smart text recognition to automatically fill in key event details so the process is fast and easy.

How we built it

We coded. A lot. (But seriously: React Native + multiple APIs + database + OCR + calendar integration.)

Challenges we ran into

None of us had worked with React Native before, so we accidentally started building the entire project in React instead, which meant we basically lost the first day. After switching, we ran into all sorts of small issues with cross-platform support, especially with layout differences on iPhones. Another big challenge was figuring out how to use OCR on PDFs and images so we could automatically extract event details and pre-fill the UI.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Fully cross-platform (iOS and Android)

Email verification

Restricted to Rochester students

Multiple APIs working together

Automatic event data detection

Calendar integration

Share-with-friends feature

Upload or scan your flyer

Automatic deletion of past events

What we learned

We learned a lot. None of us had built an app this interconnected before, with databases, AI tools, automation, etc. We also got really good at using Git in an organized, feature-based way so we could all work without stepping on each other’s changes.