Odyssey.AI

Welcome to Odyssey.AI
Uploads page for Chapter 1

Inspiration

We are adventurers, we are storytellers, we are builders, we are humans; the desire to tell stories and preserve memories lives at our core. Adventures, however you define them, drive personal transformation. We wanted to create a service that would allow people to immortalize these moments. That’s why we decided to create Odyssey.AI, a unique way for travelers to preserve and enhance their travel experiences.

Additionally, Joseph Campbell’s classic hero's journey narrative structure was a core inspiration. By allowing users to create their own hero's journey based on their travel experiences, we enable anyone to participate in this timeless storytelling tradition.

The name "Odyssey.AI" reflects our vision of offering a modern twist on the classic hero's journey concept. By using AI technology to restyle users' images and generate a genre-specific storyline, we aimed to combine human storytelling with cutting-edge technology to create a seamless, immersive experience for anyone. Ultimately, we wanted to empower people to preserve and share their travel adventures in a way that is meaningful and fun.

What it does

Odyssey.AI is a web app that allows travelers to easily reimagine their travel experiences into storytelling epics by transforming images and descriptions into a personalized, themed hero’s journey. Users can select their favorite genre for their adventure and then upload 6 travel photos, one per step on the hero’s journey (the call to adventure, crossing the threshold, facing temptation, etc) with text describing who, what, and where in the image. Then Odyssey.AI interfaces with generative AIs to transform user input into a coherent 6-chapter epic of their travels.

Odyssey.AI's AI technology then analyzes the photos and generates a six-part hero's journey storyline, complete with custom illustrations and text, that incorporates the user's photos and descriptions. The end result is a stunning visual story that captures the user's travel experiences in a unique and immersive way.

How we built it

Front End: We created a Flask web server that runs our website built with Tailwind for styling and Jinja to make it cleaner code. The data inputted and outputted to the website is routed to the backend.

Backend: A lot is going on. We used two databases to store the necessary data for the project: first, an AWS S3 bucket was used to store images that people upload and that generative AI returns to us and second, a Firebase database was used to store url’s to those photos which is necessary so that we could interface with certain generative AI models that didn’t have an API. In order to create our own API we used a combination of discord server bots, python GUI automation, and python scripts to automatically upload files from the website to generative AI with a prompt, return the result to a database, and then populate it on the website at the end. Also, we used an API for another generative AI along with tailored prompts written mad-libs style to enable user input to influence the text output that generates the user’s story.

Challenges we ran into

Some of the generative AI we used on the back end did not have APIs, so we had to create our own solutions to be able to interface with them programmatically making our backend wildly complex. As well, we had little background in front-end development so we pieced it together on the fly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of being able to turn our vision into a reality. We are all excited by generative AI, so to be able to use it along with our coding projects to create products that we would love to use is extremely exciting. We’re proud of our teamwork in making this project happen. Brian was a genius on the backend connecting everything, Ky was brilliant at diving deep into documentation and being the handy-man to fix any problem that arose in the code, Riley learned front end and build a beautiful website in one day, and Austin learned how to use APIs and prompt engineer beautiful outputs with variable user inputs.

What we learned

How to interface with Generative AI on the backend How to use Firebase Front-end development using flask, tailwind, and jinja Animating the Front End using tailwind Interacting with APIs Setting up Discord bots and performing GUI automation A whole lot of Git pushing, pulling, and merging… How powerful generative AI can be in producing meaningful content for humans

What's next for Odyssey.AI

Odyssey.AI hopes to expand the functionality of the web app to allow users to customize their stories by adjusting the storyline, adding or removing images, and editing captions and descriptions. Later we hope to connect the generated stories to physical manufacturers to enable people to create their odyssey and get it sent to them as a physical leather-bound book, movie-style poster, t-shirts, and more. Finally, we hope to increase the number of available storylines for travelers to choose from. Stories are central to the human experience, so we hope to empower people to create and share them in any way possible.