Orbit

Save time, Automate your Parking

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Inspiration

Parking in UMBC can be wonderful, but parking is dreadful. Even with permits, students can spend 15-45 minutes trying to find a spot to park in. It is simply not efficient, and is a time roulette everyday. We were inspired by combining two ideas: the collaborative nature of ride-share apps and fun incentivized aspects of gamification.

What it does

Orbit is a web-based platform that gamifies and socializes campus parking. Students who are leaving campus can give up their spot as they are leaving, and students coming onto campus can claim it. Giving up spots earns you points, which can later be redeemed for guaranteed reservations when the student would like to skip the search and booking for a spot. A built-in friends system allows students to prioritize helping people in their circle, transforming parking from the competition of cutting someone off in traffic to a collaborative experience.

How we built it

For the frontend, we used figma to design a clean, webapp interface for the students to claim, release, and track points. For the backend, we used c++ to handle the interface mechanics, user actions, and data integration features. For our database, we used SQL to store users, cars, permits, and so on. We designed it in hope to be able for it to work hand in hand with UMBC parking services, if we integrated more datasets and features in a greater time period.

Challenges we ran into

Thankfully we did not run into horrible debugging, but we did have some issues designing a fair points system that is fair yet motivating. We also needed to verify that the person attempting to park on a certain campus has the appropriate ID, which we would need a dynamic private dataset from each campus. Enforcement and penalties for running late, or trying to take/give up someone else's spot, and so on. If we had more than 24 hours, I believe these challenges can be tackled further.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the idea itself, gamification can make even stressful experiences collaborative. Building a system that encourages assists then competition. We also designed with scalability in mind so the project can not just help our campus, but extend to all campuses facing similar issues. Lastly, but certainly not least, we created a solution that bridged student convenience with administrative value by offering data insights for parking services.

What we learned

Data sets can drive programs that are crowd-sourced, meaning the more people we have use it, the better the app will get. We also learned how to structure a project for immediate use and long-term scalability. That solving small, everyday problems can have a huge impact on student life.

What's next for Orbit

We look to work with parking services to sync directly with the permit and enforcement systems for seamless validation. We look to expand to other campuses, using their data. Learn more about gamification to increase the student engagement further. We also explored integration with real-time parking with the parking sensors in the garage for live updates.

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