Ripple

Goal Visualization

Inspiration

Ripple began with the common feeling that many other people have felt before in their lives, analysis paralysis. You have goals, have a vision, but the mere thought of trying to work towards it stuns you so much so that it's overwhelming, and you end up not trying. We combat that by allowing you to voice your goals, and we blueprint it all out for you. Let us think about the intermediate steps, and we will let you do what you've always wanted for yourself.

What it does

Ripple takes in a goal-oriented prompt, either typed or spoken, and then generates a 3D visualization of nodes representing tasks that slowly work up towards your original goal. You have the option to let the AI tell you more about each goal, or you can interact with the nodes to read more for yourself. There are subtasks within each node, so you can further progress, and if it's too complicated, you can branch off that node into a tree that simplifies it even further. This produces a tree-like structure of subgoals that lead up to your original vision.

How we built it

The frontend utilizes React, Typescript, and Vite with a custom 3D timeline interface that allows goals to exist as nodes along a line. The backend utilizes a variety of core components from FastAPI for routing, gemini for input parsing, IIElevenLabs API for voice output, and a lot of Python!

Challenges we ran into

The transition from planning to development and not touching base every now and then was the number one cause for errors in this hackathon. We systematically laid out the foundation, the building blocks, and then the final ideal MVP. We made sure everybody understood how it flowed in the moment. The problem arose when the team was deep in coding after a handful of hours, and many features were in the works. Suddenly, we touch base after far too long, and at that point, something was implemented far from how it was discussed. This one situation occurred a handful of times throughout this project's run, and it has caused us to reevaluate what was accomplishable within the time frame.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

In our planning phase, we discussed 6 features. Two core MVP features, 2 features that are a pair but aren't important, and then 2 other features that are nice to have. By the end of the hackathon, we successfully achieved 5/6 of those tasks with plenty of time to do more features, but we decided it's better to focus on presentation. This hackathon was a major success compared to previous experiences for all of us, so we are pleased.

What we learned

Consistency and upkeep is the most important thing in a team. It doesnt matter if one person knows how to do everything because if even one person doesnt have the full understanding of whats happening and they start implementing features, then it only sets the entire teams progress back.

What's next for Ripple

During our planning we mentioned a completely different alternate route we could have taken. That is, instead of being a goal oreinted software, we could make it a decision-based software such that you feed it decisions instead of goals. In this way, it produces possible timelines and branches for you based on forks in the road. Its almost like a future predictor.