campus-view

Inspiration

Visiting a new location can be disorienting. College campuses can be especially difficult to navigate both for visitors and for new students, so we decided to design and app that would help newcomers to feel more at ease in a chaotic, unfamiliar environment.

What it does

The application extends the Google Maps API through the use of overlays and room-specific markers which allow the user to search for room numbers within a building and see the location marked on-screen.

How we built it

It was build in Android Studio using Java and the Google Maps API.

Challenges we ran into

When we first started working on building the app, we intended to use React Native so that the app could be used on both iOS and Android devices, but we found that the built-in functions for applying photo overlays to mapview objects in React Native has bugs which prevent the feature from being used. After spending about an hour looking for a fix, we decided that we would have a better chance of building a functional demo using a different platform, so we started building our solution using Android Studio.

Accomplishments that we are proud of

Because neither of us have experience with mobile app development, we are proud of how much we were able to accomplish both in React Native and Android Studio. We also had no experience using APIs and very little experience writing code in either Java or Javascript, so everything we've done in the past 24 hours has been picked up along the way.

What we learned

What we learned was how to create a mobile app, how to set up and use React Native, how to use Expo, how to use the Android Studio and how to use an API to accomplish a task.

What's next for room-finder

We plan to use the Google Directions API to allow the user to route from their current location to the desired classroom, add vending machine and restroom markers, and interact with the Google Places API to provide more detailed information on the locations the user searches.