Get Lost!

A web app that combines the joyful feelings of exploring and finding the hidden gems of your city while avoiding the more crowded venues.

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Inspiration

We envision, while social distancing will never stop being important, as we enter a moment of transition back into our old reality, a tool that can actively find interesting places that are more vacant at any time while still enabling the user to find those 'hidden gems' in your city.

What it does

Our app is a compass that always points the user to the most 'interesting direction'. To calculate this, we find the most interesting places nearby based on the user's preferences (stores, monuments, nature, city halls, etc.). From there, we take into consideration distance, user ratings and forecasted occupancy/busyness of the venue to find the best direction. Access it at https://www.getlost.tech.

How we built it

Based on the user's input and geolocation, our app sends an http request to a Google Cloud server-less function that fetches a variety of nearby location 'types' from the Google Maps API before fetching additional info about each place from the Google Places API and taking live vacancy forecasts from the BestTime app API. The data is then sent back to the user in a React frontend where we weigh the 'interesting'-factor of each location based on all the gathered data and find the most 'interesting direction' to pursue. The site is hosted with Google Cloud's App Engine and we received a custom domain from Domain.com.

Challenges we ran into

We took several approaches into consideration before writing any lines of code. While we were expecting to store our data about busy-hours in a database and query it through a restful api, we ended up using a public api that forecasts live data. Our reasoning was to both minimze the technical debt and facilitate integration with Google Cloud functions. By limiting queries for public data from Google Maps api to the beginning of our app's pipeline, we were able to abstract the majority of the process to a series of API calls.

It was also difficult to test our code on multiple devices and platforms. For that reason, we can only guarantee that this works on Google Chrome on an iPhone. There were some problems with the Android version that we ran out of time to fix.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're very proud that we were to combine so many different technologies into our web app: a couple different APIs, server-less cloud functions, React, Google App Engine deployment, and a custom domain name from Domain.com.

What we learned

We learned that a project that seems so simple on the outside can require so many moving parts. While all of the different technologies interacting was complicated, we eventually figured it out and learned a lot about each technology in the process.

What's next for Get Lost!

If we see high demand for Get Lost!, we'll add in more features like rating your visited locations on the app, adding more location filters, providing more detailed descriptions of each filter, and more. We would also like to make this a full-fledged app instead of a website for ease-of-use on mobile devices.

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