NetPet Screen Time Virtual Pet Companion

A cute, virtual pet companion assists users to set healthy boundaries with their technology through Screen Time Limits.

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Inspiration

In today’s digital age, screens have become an integral part of our lives. However, research indicates that excessive screen time can have detrimental effects on our health. Although Screen Time Limits are widely used to combat this, the lack of incentive and accountability to actually abide by these limits often lead to an inconsequential dismissal of the reminders.

Therefore, we were inspired to create an adorable, virtual internet pet, Netpet, that plays an active role in reminding and incentivizing users of their screen time limits. By synthesizing the functionality of Screen Time Limits and the cuteness of virtual pet companionship, users will finally be incentivized to make lessening screen time a priority and prioritize their mental wellness.

What it does

Users can custom select the website/app they want to set a time restraint on. Once the time runs out, like typical Screen Time Limits, Users are encouraged to select “OK”, to respect the limit, or “ignore limit for today”, to disregard the limit entirely, or “remind me in 15 min” to elongate the limit. However, unlike the standard Screen Time Limits, the users’ selection will either earn or lose them HP, which allows users to accessorize and level up their virtual pet as they rack up HP by respecting the time limit.

How we built it

We looked at the documentation for Tkinter, and then we brainstormed ideas of what software would be compatible. Since Tkinter is a development framework for desktop apps, and we could import AppKit to develop the screen time fetch for macOS systems, we decided on this framework. We animated and drew all the designs by hand in Clip Studio Paint, and though we didn't realize at the start, Tkinter actually didn't support these animations! However, we were determined to implement them in the app, so we did some research and found the Pillow library, which allowed to iteratively and manually process and display our animations through .gif files!

Challenges we ran into

Since Tkinter is a Mac-OS-based technology, one of our groupmates experienced a lot of compatibility issues with working on the project since he has a Windows computer. Pushing to Github was difficult for another one of our team members because she didn't have push permissions (and the team member who created the repo left the workspace fairly early on in the project). We also experienced a lot of difficulty with the Tkinter library itself, since it doesn't support animation or videos at all, which was an important part of our product, since one of our groupmates spent 12+ hours making pixel animation by hand for our app graphics.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We got a working product! We also learned a lot about building a desktop app. Our demo video is really fun and engaging, and though our app isn't perfect, we still feel that we've come a million miles in the last 24 hours.

What we learned

We learned how to use Tkinter, how to build a desktop app, how to solve difficult merge conflicts on GitHub, as well as how to use Clip Studio Paint and do handmade pixel animation in one day!

What's next for NetPet Screen Time Virtual Pet Companion

The app has a long way to go in terms of a polished product, so we'd like to be able to add screen time for different apps, as well as an implementation of a game-like HP (health points) and XP (experience points) system where pets can be leveled up and evolve (kind of like Pokemon!). Perhaps, since Tkinter presented a lot of challenges in regards to UI, we could also consider switching to a more flexible framework (especially one that's friendlier on both Windows and Mac.

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