In our digital age, it's hard to gauge a genuine reaction to communication we send. With MojiChat, intended to seek a solution to that problem, using the preferred alphabet of our generation--emoji.
What it does
MojiChat lets you send your friends captioned photos and get their facial response in the form of an emoji. When a friend sends you a photo on MojiChat, it takes a photo of your face and determines the emotion of it, and sends one of eight animated emoji back, each corresponding to an emotion.
How we built it
MojiChat's core technology is Microsoft Cognitive Service's Emotion API, which can determine emotion from photos. The app itself is built entirely in Swift and runs on a Firebase backend.
Challenges we ran into
We originally intended to run MojiChat on a Parse analog, and had some trouble learning the ins and outs of Firebase. As with any unfamiliar technology, it felt as though we were swimming upstream some of the time, which when we were especially glad to have Firebase mentors on site to help us out.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We developed a unique alphabet of emoji specifically for the app, all of which were fully animated by our team graphic designer, Julian. We also had a very clear vision from the start and worked to follow through on the app we wanted to create at HackMIT 2016. Finally, we worked as a team to create a clear and understandable user interface for the app.
What we learned
Backends as a service take time to learn- they aren't always just plug and play! And of course, software development always takes twice as long as you expect it to.
What's next for MojiChat
The four of us learned a lot about what we can and cannot do developing this app, and will definitely be taking it to our projects in the future, whether they be on iOS, the web, or a gessoed canvas.
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