ReadTheRoom

Home Page
Campus Events Page
East Library
Chatbot
Design Diagram

Inspiration

Finding a study spot on campus is frustrating, especially for new students, commuters, or anyone unfamiliar with the school layout. Students often walk from building to building just to find a place to sit. We built ReadTheRoom to make Hunter College more inclusive by helping every student, no matter their background, feel more connected and informed.

What it does

ReadTheRoom helps students find available study spaces in real time. We use camera feeds and AI to detect how crowded different rooms are and relevant information with a click of a button. In addition, Hunter students, new or returning, can find more information about events at Hunter and study spaces by using the events tab or the chatbot. All these features are aimed at one thing -- allowing Hunter students to find new spots/events for hanging out and meeting new people along the way. We hope ReadTheRoom leads to new friends and increased activity outside of classes in Hunter.

How we built it

Flask, React + TypeScript, OpenCV, GPT-4, AWS, PostgreSQL

Challenges we ran into

Thinking of how to connect cameras to our web app was a new and unique experience. We decided that having a separate app for the camera API was our best bet. In addition, we had trouble with the limits of our database -- having multiple computers using the camera API and requesting the database was passing the limit for the database. After some tweaking and manual testing, we found that changing the latency bypassed this shortcoming without compromising the speed of our web-app.