Whenever we spent long hours in traffic jams, there was always a lot of spare time on everyone's hand whilst being stuck in almost non-moving traffic. The choices of what to do were limited, and why not be somewhat sociable and all help or communicate together when going through the same struggle? That's why we created JamChat, an app that geo-localises you in the current traffic jam you are stuck in, and links you with all the others that feel like chatting together in a chatroom. This could be just for chatting, but also for up-to-date info as well as possible help that might be needed.
When the app starts the user is presented with a box to enter a username, provided they have not done so before, as the app stores the username to speed up getting into the chatroom on other occasions. The user's location is then gathered, and uploaded to a list of live users on a Firebase database. All rooms and users are stored here, and the app searches for nearby rooms that are already open to place you in. If no rooms can be found, then any nearby users are placed into a new room. From here the user can chat to other users in a simple IRC-like interface.
We are quite proud of our design, and also the integration with Firebase to create chatrooms and store the location of each user.
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