Lookout

Inspiration

Traditional navigation apps focus on getting to your destination as fast as possible, minimizing travel times and fuel efficiency. We wanted to build an app for the people who choose to travel for the journey instead of those who are in it for the destination.

What it does

Using your starting point and destination, Lookout calculates a route similar to other navigation apps, but takes crime statistics, accident rates, construction projects, and live congestion data into account for a route based around safety and simplicity for added peace of mind. Our travel assistant powered by Google Gemini allows the user to ask about other points of interest near their route, giving opportunities to discover new restaurants, beautiful scenery, and interesting attractions.

How we built it

We decided to use flutter to create the webapp so that it would be able to run on both iOS and Android. We created python scripts to strip any data from pdfs and excel sheets that we found with information we need. We also created a postgresql server where we set up a database with data that we make constant calls to when creating routes.

Challenges we ran into

One of the challenges we faced was getting our DigitalOcean database set up. Because we were unable to get the credits onto our account, we had to find alternative place to setup our data hosting, and after some debate, we chose to set up a Postgres server on a VPS. Another challenge we faced was collecting the data for our route creating, ranging from finding the best places on the way to stop to finding data to create the safest routes.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Learning flutter quickly to create the app so that is suitable for both iOS and Android. Adding the GMaps API and getting it to work was also a huge accomplishment we were proud of. Finally getting the crime into our route search algorithm.

What we learned

We learned Flutter, Google Maps API, Postgres, and ElevenLabs in order to include all of other features we wanted in our app.

What's next for Lookout

Moving forward, we want to expand out configurability and environmental factors that may affect travels. We want to include data about weather, sunrise and sunset times, and location popularity.