HERES Matsuri - 祭 -

HERES Matsuri is an app that lets you share the real-time location of festival floats or mikoshi by placing a smartphone on them—perfect for enjoying parades together from anywhere.

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In Japanese, "matsuri - 祭" means "festival."

💡 Inspiration

Have you heard of the Gion Festival in Kyoto? It's arguably the oldest and most famous festival in Japan, with a history of about 1,100 years. It might even be the oldest in the world!

I absolutely love festivals and parades, but I always seem to miss the very floats (known as Yamahoko) I want to see most.

"There has to be an easier way," I thought. "With smartphones, sharing location data should be simple."

So, I decided to build it!

With a growing number of international tourists visiting Japan, sharing real-time information about the Gion Festival in multiple languages will make the experience even more exciting and accessible for everyone!

✨ What it does

🏮 For Float Operators: Simply install the app on each manager's smartphone to continuously broadcast the float's live location.

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 For the Audience: Open the app on your smartphone, and a map instantly appears, sharing real-time locations of all the floats. It even supports a 3D view for a truly immersive experience!

🛠️ How we built it

We developed two separate projects to ensure a smooth experience for everyone:

1. 📱 Native App for Floats (iOS/Android) We built a native app using Expo to ensure stable and reliable location data transmission at all times. And geolocation data is collected and published in the GTFS-RT open standard format by Supabase Edge function.

2. 💻 Web App for the Audience (PC/Smartphone) This allows anyone to check the festival's location information from anywhere, on any device.

💦 Challenges we ran into

Initially, we tried to build everything in a single project, but we quickly ran into difficulties.

When we added a library for location and map functionalities to support both iOS and Android, it caused unexpected side effects on the web platform. This led us to the decision to split the project in two.

🏆 Accomplishments that we're proud of

We have successfully built the native iOS and Android apps. While we didn't make it in time for a public release on the App Stores, they are now ready for real-world testing via TestFlight.

This year's Gion Festival starts in July, with the main parade (Yamahoko Junko) on July 17th.

We are incredibly proud to be in talks with the festival's volunteer team to use our app for this year's event. We are determined to make it happen and contribute to the festival's success!

📖 What we learned

  • The Power of AI: We were amazed at how quickly AI-assisted development can accelerate the process once you get the hang of it.
  • The Importance of an MVP: We originally aimed to create a real-time location app with many more features (you can see traces of our early ambitions here). We learned the critical lesson of narrowing our focus to an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) to test our core idea first.

🚀 What's next for HERES Matsuri - 祭 -

Our immediate goal is to help as many people as possible enjoy the Gion Festival in July 2025!

Looking ahead, we have many more features we'd love to add:

  • 🧊 I want to create realistic 3D models of the floats to replace the current icons on the 3D map.
  • 💖 A function for the audience to send messages of support and tips directly to the float operators.
  • 🎉 The ability for attendees to share their own real-time information, such as street performances, interesting sights, or crowd levels.

Our ultimate dream is to expand this platform to festivals all across Japan and, someday, to the Carnival in Rio!

Built With

  • bolt.new
  • expo.io
  • netlify
  • plateau
  • react
  • react-nataive
  • supabase
  • tailwind
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