Noma - Discover and share your travel experience with ease

Inspiration

With the increasing ease of travel, we wanted to create a platform that was home to a niche community of travel lovers to document and share your trips. If travel posts are posted to other platforms, they will get overshadowed by other pictures. With Noma, you can upload your images and easily create a journal of your trips and share it with other. Discover places that you want to visit and much more

The logo is a creative spin on the name of the website and a compass. Using each letter to point to a cardinal direction, with the letter N pointing North, it expresses users’ desire to see different corners of the Earth.

What it does

Noma—derived from the word “nomad” describing people who roam around, excited about travelling to new destinations, allows you to upload multiple pictures from your trip to produce a short narrative of your adventures! For example, if the Eiffel tower is spotted, the computer vision says its here. Cohere then writes a little bit about the famous monument and the user’s journey.

How we built it

Technically, Noma uses Google vertex AI computer vision to recognize the image, including landmarks and activity, generating keywords on what’s happening in the picture. These words then get fed to cohere, using its Large Language Models (LLMs) to create semantics in the form of a journal or caption.

Challenges we ran into

Several challenges. Choosing the right API. Debugging several networks, API keys, and synchronous code issues. Integrating the front-end and back-end servers. Settled on using Google Vertex CV API however even that proved to be an issue as we had to convert base64 bits into strings which was quite difficult on our language of choice, Javascript!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Proud of the final product and it solves a major problem that people face. The front-end design looks great. We were able to learn a lot of technologies and frameworks. There's also quite a lot of potential for this project as it can be turned into a social media app for travelers and at the same time, be quite a useful piece of technology for the average person.

What we learned

We learned how hard it is to build a working software product that people would love to use. Learnt several tools, frameworks. Learnt how to build API pipelines .

What's next for Noma - Discover and share travel your experience with ease

There is a lot more that can be done to enhance the Noma experience! For example, programming notifications, direct messaging, sharing of travel itineraries and plans, and potentially even expand into a travel website, partnering up with companies and bringing users the best flights! Ultimately, this website is imagined as a social media app to inspire and connect users that love travel! Though such users can be found on other platforms, Noma creates a niche community that’s dedicated to travel. It ensures that only the most interested are attracted to create a community that is so eager to see the world like no other.

Built With

• axios
• cohere
• express.js
• google-cloud
• react