Phone tag is a game played electronically to augment and facilitate the simple game of tag. Inspired by William James Rowe, who suggested stealth-based rubber band gun wars, Vincent Boling developed the idea of a less disruptive electronic version. The app has been developed with the intent of administering the game of tag without contact. During the pandemic, similar games were made hazardous and phone tag allows tag to be played regardless.
We set out using GPS, APIs, your Phone’s inbuilt Magnetometer and Flask in tandem to create a cone based on your phone’s position allowing you to. The original idea “Camera Tag” was based on Computer Vision, but was scrapped due to our skillset.
Conceptually the system is fairly reliable. Most GPS trackers can give you a level of certainty for your location, allowing us to add a scaling margin for error. The logic is essentially when the “Tag” button is pressed, the game checks if any other users are in the bounding box of the cone, if yes, a message is sent to user to indicated they have been tagged.
Team Nova learned that feasibility testing and knowing the limitations is crucial in this type of competition. Our challenges took far too much time to tackle, two of which did not yield any fruit. We should have set tighter deadlines before falling back to our contingencies. We had two main challenges. Firstly, on an IOS device to access the internal compass we were required to have a secure connection/source. This meant we had to either have it secured, turn our app into an IOS app (as opposed to a web app) or otherwise circumvent it. We had our logic early last night, but we spent the majority of our time trying to circumvent the limitations, but we were unable to secure our connection. On a related note, we could have done all this in an IOS app, but none of us had requisite skills in Swift, the language IOS development is in. Given a secure domain or enough time to learn Swift, we could have successfully oriented the cones. Instead we had to compromise. Without the direction of the cones we made the Tagging area a radius. We had several ideas for gamemodes. One was traditional tag (1 person is it), infection tag, and a format where you have a target. We ended up settling on infection tag, but with minimal effort we could add more gamemodes. The Webapp is also limited by the fact that all phones must be on the website to p
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