LenScape

Inspiration

Even though we have a big city around us to explore, we often find ourselves feeling isolated on our college campuses. We wanted to find a way to encourage people to go outside and give them a reason to become familiar with their surrounding area. We thought this would be great for people new to an area or even for people who are looking to be tourists in their own cities.

What it does

LenScape encourages people to go out and explore famous landmarks in their cities. We recommend 5 landmarks a week from a user's surrounding city. Users are then meant to visit these locations, take a picture at the location, and upload to LenScape. LenScape then analyzes the picture to verify that the landmark in the picture is indeed one of the landmarks that the user was meant to visit that week. The goal is that as a user visits completes more landmark challenges, they become more familiar with their cities.

How we built it

We used a React Native and Node.js tech stack. We also made calls to the Gemini API as well as the Google Cloud Vision API so we could generate popular landmarks and identify if a user actually visited these generated landmarks. Finally, we integrated a map into our React Native UI using the Google Maps iOS SDK.

Challenges we ran into

It was quite difficult to get all of the features of the frontend working together with the backend. More specifically, even though we were able to get the camera functionality to work with the backend, integrating the map functionality proved to be quite challenging. In addition, all of us are quite new to React Native and Node.js, having only taking intro level courses on software development, so the learning curve was quite steep. However, this made it all the more rewarding when some of our features actually started functioning as we had envisioned, especially the landmark recognition from the images uploaded by the camera.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're really proud of the backend and certain components of the frontend. We really enjoyed working with the Google Cloud Vision as well as the Gemini API because it genuinely felt magical when they actually worked. We're also really proud of the camera sending images to the server, and returning if a landmark was detected or not.

What we learned

With this being the first real hackathon any of us has been a part of, we can confidently say that we have learned a lot, not only about building a project together, but also about the hackathon environment. We definitely got a stronger grasp on React Native and Node.js and how the two interact with each other, and even though it was quite difficult using them during these past few days, we definitely feel more comfortable with the overall workflow.

What's next for LenScape

We really would love to have pinned locations marked as complete as people visit them so that they can see new locations every week. In the far future, we would also love to integrate friends so that people can see places their friends have visited as well as help plan trips together. Adding directions, specifically transit and biking directions, to the landmarks is also a goal for us so that we encourage users of LenScape to use green transportation options.

Built With

• gemini-api
• google-cloud-vision
• google-maps
• node.js
• react-native