[Life Crusaders] Sojourner

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  Brief Overview

Theme: Re-defining the Post-Pandemic Traveling Landscape

Problem Statement: In a post-pandemic era, traveling around the globe has emerged as the top priority in various tourists’ agenda, putting the aviation and tourism sectors under the spotlight! As such, curate an application or software that enhances tourists’ experience and/or optimises the operations of the aviation industry.

Inspiration

The COVID-19 pandemic has trapped us all in our homes for far too long. As family and friends start travelling again, our Instagram feeds have filled with many wonderful memories and awesome photos of interesting destinations.

However, the lack of curation for saving posts/stories/reels tagged to a specific location makes it rather difficult to plan your own trip to include these finds.

Another specific pain that a team member found is that it is difficult to travel immersively, due to language barriers or just plain lack of curation. Thus, you might find yourself in a beautiful church, but leave with just some photographs of the architecture and signs in foreign languages without learning much about the history or culture of the place you just visited.

Our Sojourner app is the solution; a consolidated curation platform for you to plan for the destinations you want to visit based on any sources of digital information you come across, while also providing juicy tidbits about those destinations to value-add to your travelling experience!

What it does

It is both a travel planner and tracker, with social and gamificiation elements integrated for the most personalised experience.

In the app, you are a Sojourner. You can start journeys, to which you add quests. A quest is a specific location or attraction, and completing a quest (visiting the area) grants the user points. A quest is completed when the user is deemed to be within the area of the quest location.

Social

1. Follow users, and get notified whenever they publish a new journey.

Travel Planning

1. Browse journeys that others have created.
2. View quests within those journeys, view the points awarded and see which of your followers have also completed that quest.

Travel Points

1. Gain points by embarking on journeys and completing quests!

Functionality Overview

At it's core, Sojourner provides the following functionalities:

• Users are able to create Journeys, which they add specific destinations to. Each Journey represents a single trip
• Within a journey, individual destinations are added as Quests to be completed.
  • Quests can be added from other people's Journeys! This serves as a discovery and saving mechanism that allows you to organically find uncharted gems from other people's trips.
  • Quests give you points upon completion! These points can be exchanged for real-world perks (more explained below).
  • workInProgress:Quests can be searched from Google Maps, with reviews loaded as well! This gives us a bootstrap list of locations for people to add to their Journeys, with useful information about the locations as well!
  • workInProgress: Quests can also be added from other sites or sources, if they do not currently exist. For example, if the Rosengarten doesn't exist, users can paste in a website that will then be processed to autofill a new Quest.
  • workInProgress: Quests can also include real-world easter eggs. For example, you could be asked to photograph the destination at a specific time or place (E.g. Taking a sunset photo in the Rosengarten in Bern). This would give the Sojourners additional points!
  • workInProgress: Completion of a review upon completion of the Quest would also give Sojourners additional points! This helps to give other Sojourners more information on that location.
• As mentioned above, Quest completion gives you points! These points are stored and accumulated in your account.
  • workInProgress: These points can be exchanged for cool souvenirs or discounts during your trip (or your next trip). This forms a core part of the gamified experience; however, we currently do not have any partners yet that are willing to join our point exchange system.
• A friend system also exists for you to find and follow other Sojourners!
  • This allows you to find locations that your friends have visited. Now you can have a firsthand review of what your friends liked about the location!

How we built it

We first drafted a UI on Figma, then worked on converting our ideas into a working web-based prototype.

For the prototype, Google OAuth was used for user authentication. NextJS, React and Tailwind was used for the frontend and Planetscale was used as the SQL database, with Prisma as the ORM. Zod was used to validate requests to the API at runtime. Typescript was used alongside Prisma and Zod, to achieve type safety across the app, including APIs and database.

• The following libraries/frameworks are used: nextjs, prisma, react, radixui, tailwindcss
• The following services are used: planetscale, vercel, oauth
• Programming language: Typescript

Challenges we ran into

It took us a while to find the key features to include in the MVP; too excited about the entire project! Alas, we can't cram all the features out in these 3 short days, so we had to pick and choose the ones that really mattered.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We made a working MVP in 3 short days (and nights) during this hackathon; we think it's an awesome achievement, and we would love to see this continue on to a full-fledged project!

What we learned

What's next for [Life Crusaders] Sojourner

The key functionalities that would be important to add to this MVP would be the following:

1. Journey Sharing: Auto-generating a video from a completed journey, showing photos along the way and the overall route.
2. Integrations: Quests information can be extracted from websites and user-provided content (videos, Instagram links) via ChatGPT API or other natural language processing solutions.
3. Quest Completion: Image recognition of real-life easter eggs and Geofencing can be implemented for verifying quest completion.

Experimental features we are considering but currently unviable:

1. Meetups: Sojourners at the same Quest can team up to complete easter eggs! Or even have a spontaneous Amazing Race/Competition (think Pokemon GO Gym Raids but more fun). This is still a bit dubious though, with unverified users and active access of location generating possible privacy and safety issues.
2. A modified version for local tourism could be considered, if SgID authentication is integrated. Interested? @OGP @STB

Built With

• nextjs
• oauth
• planetscale
• prisma
• radixui
• react
• tailwindcss
• typescript
• vercel