FlightSpace

FlightSpace landing page

Inspiration

When Vueling presented their challenge, the whole team's eyes lit up. The interesting challenge and the creative freedom caught our attention. We unanimously agreed on doing that project without sharing a single word. Each with our own perspective, we came up with many ideas on how to handle our area of expertise. But that wouldn't be without challenge - We all ventured out to the unknown and went above and beyond to provide the best user experience.

What it does

FlightSpace provides an infotainment system for planes (or any sort of mass transit) without the need of a connection to the internet. But it does so with a twist - Users can interact with each other. On our demo, we made a trivia game where users can see each other making decisions in real time.

How we built it

We built the backend, which is a REST API in Rust. The backend handles player stats and other API calls. The game mechanics and player interactions are made with JavaScript and HTML5 canvas. The stunning UI was built with vanilla HTML and CSS.

Challenges we ran into

Working on and with a REST API was a first for all of us. Handling the multi-threaded web server was a huge challenge, one we learnt a lot with solving. Working with this kind of interactive platform and with HTML5 canvases was also a first for the members working on the frontend.

There were loads of hard-to-find bugs (but fairly to fix): things that didn't work and left no error trail, things that did work after not working for hours (and not chaning anything), code doing things we didn't ask it to do... Integrating the frontend and the backend has been a hard job, as transferring some of the objects between languages lead to problems due to differences in object types.

Regardless on what part we worked on, there's a challenge we all faced: Staying organized on a team. Building a UI without having an API to support it yet and building an API without having a direct feel of how it's going to be used makes team communication a critical skill we all developed on.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of making a blazingly fast REST API server from scratch, and providing a user experience unlike any other. We're proud of what we were able to achieve in such a small time frame and all the learning we had to do in the process.

Built With

Submitted to

HackUPC 2023

Created by

I worked on the backend. It has been my first time working on anything web related, since I mostly focus on embedded firmware and CLI. Having made hardware I/O APIs for embedded before, I decided to take on the challenge and I learnt a lot about web APIs. I was also forced to work with and learn about multi-threaded programs, which I had been avoiding for a long time.

Slushee A
I’ve mainly worked in the frontend design, making things go to other things, plus, having an appealing design so that users already know how to use it before even having to know about it

Yazide Arsalan
aka yzde
I've been working on the frontend side of things. I've learnt how to write JavaScript web to create and interact with a canvas object, as I've been in charge of making Slushee's hard work on the backend side visible to the front users.

Marcy Roca
Mohammed Tahmid Islam