LifeMap

Archive Snippets of your Life, Encourage Reflection on how you've Changed.

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Inspiration

LifeMap is inspired by YOU. It's a swiss army knife for self reflection; through comparison with previous snapshots of your opinions, sentiment, and perspectives on a variety of topics.

How LifeMap Relates to the Prompts

Critical Thinking, media-literacy, problem solving, education, or combating misinformation We saw an opportunity with this prompt to encourage users to think critically about their own life experiences. Provide them a chance to reflect on their previous selves and learn from it.

Preservation and Accessibility of Archives At first we struggled to think of a unique way to incorporate this. So much of our data is already preserved and stored all across the internet. But with the idea of self-reflection, we decided to store a user perspectives and life goals for them to look back on.

What it does

LifeMap builds a detailed report of your answers to the same questions over time. Can you remember what your ideal life was three years ago? Your physical energy levels? No. LifeMap can.

There are 3 types of questions available as of right now. These are true or false, rating on a scale of 1-10, and free form. Each question is displayed in an intuitive manner that clearly visualizes what changed. This empowers users to think deeply and retrieve patterns from LifeMap that would otherwise be impossible to see.

How we built it

We used NextJS with TypeScript to design a robust web application with compartmentalized, reusable components. Questions and data of different types are presented in a manner that can easily be built upon. To persist user data across sessions we connected to Firebase.

We used custom SVG graph components, so stack overflow + chatgpt, to visualize numerical data. Booleans are displayed in essentially the same way. In order to visualize free form responses, we connected to OpenAI's API using gpt-5-mini to analyze and compare answers over time. The prompt is optimized to be quick and straight to the point.

Challenges we ran into

The first challenge we ran into was deciding a project, we spent hours hopping around and restarting until we found something that stuck.

LifeMap itself came with huge challenges. The most prevalent of these being how to display free form responses. The numerical data was easy, and booleans were harder but still pretty straightforward. We knew it would require some kind of NLP, but by the time we got around to developing this it was already 6am. We got the final visualization, but not without difficulty.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of developing an effective tool for self reflection and improvement using archives. LifeMap builds a digital legacy for users while they develop a deeper understanding of themselves.

What we learned

  • Google Auth and Firebase
  • OpenAI api Integration
  • Team Collaboration and Communication Skills
  • Data Processing & Encoding
  • Use branches. Idk why we didnt use branches.

What's next for LifeMap

Go big or go home

  • Share growth snapshots with other users on a public profile
  • Custom goals
  • Joined custom goals with friends
  • Providing Reflection oportinites on previous responses
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