a conversation...

Image of our open world
image of our open world
image of our open world
image of usage of ai api
the backend code
html page
bash control
backend dashboard with pythonanwhere
backend home page where the front end pulls information from

Inspiration

Our inspiration for this project comes from our own experiences as University students. As students, we understand the importance of mental health and the role it plays in one's day to day life. With increasing workloads, stress of obtaining a good co-op and maintaining good marks, people’s mental health takes a big hit and without a good balance can often lead to many problems. That is why we wanted to tackle this challenge while also putting a fun twist.

Our goal with our product is to help provide users with mental health resources, but that can easily be done with any google search so that is why we wanted to add an “experience” part to our project where users can explore and learn more about themselves while also aiding in their mental health.

What it does

Our project is a simulation where users are placed in a very calm and peaceful world open to exploration. Along their journey, they are accompanied by an entity that they can talk to whenever they want. This entity is there to support them and is there to demonstrate that they are not alone. As the user walks through the world, there are various characters they can meet that can provide the user with resources such as links, articles, etc. that can help better their mental health. When the user becomes more comfortable and interested, they have the choice to learn more and provide more information about themselves. This allows the user to have more personal resources such as local support groups in their area, etc.

How we built it

We divided ourselves into two separate teams where one team works on the front end and the other on the back end. For our front end, we used unity to develop our world and characters. For the back end, we used openai’s chat API in order to generate our helpful resources with it all being coded in python. To connect our backend with our front end, we decided to use flask and a server website called Pythonanywhere.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into multiple challenges during our time building this project. The first challenge was really nailing down on how we would want to execute our project. We spent a lot of time discussing how we would want to make our project unique while still achieving our goals. Furthermore, another challenge came with the front end as building the project on unity was challenging itself. We had to figure out how to receive input by the user and make sure that our back end gives us the correct information.

Finally, to adhere to all types of accessibility, we also decided to add a VR option to our simulation for more immersion so that the user can really feel like they are in a safe space to talk and that there are people to help them. Getting the VR setup was very difficult but also a super fun challenge.

For our back end, we encountered many challenges, especially getting the exact responses we wanted. We really had to be kinda creative on how we wanted to give the user the right responses and ensure they get the necessary resources.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of the final product that we have come up with, especially our front end as that was the most challenging part. This entire project definitely pushed all of us past our skill level and we most definitely learned a lot.

What we learned

We learnt a lot during this project. We most definitely learnt more about working as a team as this was our second official time working together. Not only that, but in terms of technical skills, we all believe that we had learnt something new and definitely improved the way we think about certain aspects of coding