TravelFromHome

An entertaining and interactive puzzle simulating a travel destination, allowing users to pass time and enjoy the outdoors without leaving their house and breaking health regulations.

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Inspiration

For my project, I decided to deal with one of the many problems that the world is facing because of COVID -19. Many people across the world are stuck in their homes and will continue to be for the foreseeable future, thereby canceling many vacations and trips. As a result, nobody will be able to see the amazing venues across the world.

What it does

I decided to create a simple application for people to play with; to pass time and provide a source of entertainment. It consists of a (graphic user interface) game. The user will try to put together a scrambled picture of a randomized famous place somewhere around the world. If they are successful, and ending screen with a button will show up. Once they press the button, it will redirect them to a link in their browser, and they have the opportunity to view the image in virtual reality (as a way to try to simulate their visit since they likely won’t be able to visit it). With this project, people are able to play the game and virtually see some hand-picked places; the Colosseum, the Beach, the Eiffel Tower, the Sagrada Familia, or/and fireworks. Hundreds of pictures can easily be added. This game is a fun pastime for people who are bored at home with nothing to do during the quarantine.

How I built it

The code for the program was written entirely in Java. For the VR, I used A-Frame on Glitch online. The picture was a 360-degree photo from the web integrated using HTML.

Challenges I ran into

Finding a way to shuffle the order of the photos, as well as coding an algorithm that could constantly detect if the user has solved the puzzle. For the first challenge, I ended up creating two arrays of JButtons with action commands, and for the second challenge, it was solved using nested for loops.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

  • Coding the entire project myself
  • Finding a way to incorporate HTML in a Java Gui

What I learned

  • How to incorporate URLs for both links and attaching images using links (instead of file path/location because it isn't accessible for everyone or differs by person)
  • Lots of 2D data structure algorithms

What's next for PuzzleVR

  • Allowing user to choose size of puzzle (row and columns)
  • Adding a wider variety of photo choices
  • Allowing user to choose puzzle photo
  • Finding better quality + more accurate 360 degree versions of each landmark

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