Hitchhacking

Inspiration

Garrelt is an ambitious hitchhiker! When going from London to Oxford it costs him a lot of money! That's why Garrelt hitchhikers! Garrelt misses security, comfort and fun when traveling to his admired destination. We build Hitchhacking to make hitchhiking great again!

What it does

Hitchhacking connects millions of drivers with matching Hitchhikers. We match the direction of the drivers route, with the admired direction of the Hitchhiker. By using advanced similiarity matching, we prioritze a matching of people, who share the same interests. Speech messages with each request help to keep an authentic environment.

How I built it

We build the app as an Android App in Java. The Backend is running on an Apache maschine only throug php scripts. The communication is realized over json. The database is a mysql database.

Challenges I ran into

We had to advance the app's usability to make it comfortable for both participants use the app throughout a longer route. Additionally the driver shouldn't be distracted while driving. Keeping the app simple was a main aspect of the development. Moreover, the algorithm to find the correct direction of drivers without them having to type in a destination was a challenge and has still some room for improvement.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We're proud of the simplicity of our API and the fact of using speech massages as a function to make both participant into contact.

What I learned

We learned a lot about the work with gps targeted development and the small challenges when working in Android Studio.

What's next for Hitchhacking

We will need to advance our algorithm for finding people with matching directions, to make it more functional in urban areas. We would like to implement speech recoginition for having less interaction with the app through the driver. Our matching algorithm for common interest has some more room for improvement and should be implemented as a self learning one.