Memory Lane

A screenshot of our UI
Our UI in action!

Inspiration

In this digital age, pictures are often stored and forgotten in the archives of our devices. Long gone are the days of sitting on the couch and flipping through albums with loved ones, reminiscing about fun times and new adventures. With Memory Lane, we hope to bring back the joy of lost memories, as players attempt to recall the minor details, surrounded by family and friends.

What it does

Players will choose and upload photos from old folders or cloud storage. Then the players will guess when and where a random image was taken. The closer the guess in time and space, the higher your score!

How we built it

Memory Lane is full stack application, using Vite/React for the UI and frontend, while employing Node.js for the backend processes. It also offers an authentication service provided by Auth0, allowing easy authentication and access to pictures stored in cloud services such as Google Photos. We have also developed a database for user information storage using Kintone, creating the potential for album uploads and API key safekeeping.

Challenges we ran into

The first problem we encountered was during the ideation stage. We found early on that everyone had a different take on the main theme, nostalgia. Some associated it to old devices and toys, while others felt it was better evoked by experiences. As such, we discovered that nostalgia is different for everyone, and thus, our solution needed to interact differently with every user. With that idea as our main focus, Memory Lane took form as the interactive/innovative photo album.

Our second major issue was coming up with a tech stack that worked well with our team and the event categories. This is the first time our team has worked together, and thus, we had significant differences in experience and preferred technologies. As such, we ended up having people allocated to problems they were not accustomed to, resulting in significant time losses and confusions.

Finally, our last concern was regarding the image data storage and display functions. As none of our teammates were well acquainted with Vite/React, we ended up with a lot of errors when it came to our images, with us even believing it to be impossible at one point. This was a huge problem, as what is a photo album without photos?

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Although our team was very different/spontaneous, we all managed to work together to cover any weaknesses and solve challenging problems. All members had to learn new technologies on the fly, often jumping straight from tutorials to full-on debugging in the span of 15 minutes. As such, demoing this app is an achievement for us due to how a lot of the tools, technologies, and libraries we used are new to us.

What we learned

In addition to demoing, we also managed to work with/learn many new technologies and programming principles, such as Map APIs, game logic design and NLPs. Having come up with an idea that involves all of these new concepts and successfully implementing them is something we consider as a huge success!

What's next for Memory Lane

We realize that everyone has a different affiliation with nostalgia, and wishes to interact with it in a unique way. As such, we hope to introduce many new features to Memory Lane, including