LockedIn

Cover
Navigation from entrance to room
Mobile View

Inspiration

As UW engineering students, studying takes up the majority of our day (sadly). Especially during the exam season, finding a place to study in popular places like the library or student centre is impossible. However we quickly discovered that the UW Portal app lists free classrooms with no lectures going on for the rest of the day! We found that these rooms are completely silent, isolated from other students, and have no distractions. However, there was one issue: these classrooms are scattered across campus and the rooms can be difficult to find.

After learning about MappedIn, we knew it was the missing piece of the puzzle. MappedIn can create 3D designs of buildings across campus, allowing us to find to available empty classrooms easily. Combined with the UW Portal API, we were inspired to create a tool that drastically cuts down on finding open classrooms, and lets us get to studying faster!

What it does

Users can navigate to https://www.lockedin.study/ to see a 3D rendering of buildings that have available empty classrooms. They can select any of the available buildings to access, as well as a room number and the floor of the building that they are on. MappedIn will then create a straightforward path to the room, traversing floors if necessary.

How we built it

We used React with TypeScript to build the front end of the project, using the MappedIn SDK to create navigation routes. We also using MappedIn's platform to create a complete indoor map of select buildings on campus. We integrated the UW Portal API to dynamically generate available study rooms in buildings. For the backend, we used Express.js to store basic info about user likes and study room availability.

Challenges we ran into

Working with MappedIn's SDK and mapping editor was a new experience for all three of us. In particular, creating navigation routes spanning multiple floors was a challenge, but we were quickly able to figure out how to use MappedIn's React hooks and map objects.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of successfully implementing our map with the UI while keeping the interface accessible and clean. Working on solving a problem that all three members experience daily was very enjoyable since we got to solve a problem that directly influences our day-to-day life in university.

What we learned

Building LockedIn inspired all three of us to go out of our comfort zones with new technologies and skills. We all came out of this with greatly improved frontend, backend, design, and mapping skills.

What's next for LockedIn

In the future, we aim to implement geolocation to make the user experience even simpler by tracking their movements in real-time. Geolocation can also be used to detect if a classroom is in use.