Inspiration
Our team believes that the most important part of culture preservation relies on education. Throughout the years, numerous monumental figures and events have occurred that many of our peers are not aware about, simply due to the lack of education they receive on these events. This is even more prevalent with Black Culture - a culture so rich in history in this country which deserves a spotlight among our society. With this project we aim to provide the most immersive experience to explore important landmarks in Black Culture. Our app, called "ROOTS", aims to uncover important landmarks that make up the roots of our society today.
What it does
With our web application, users are able to view important cultural landmarks in various cities by scrolling through the carousel. An image relevant to the landmark shows up on the left, while an incredibly interactive street view panoramic is placed next to it. Users can look around this view and move throughout the virtual environment to gain a more immersive experience than just viewing images or reading text. Below these, we have a detailed description of relevant facts along with a link to learn more about the landmark. Additionally, users can add their own landmarks they recognize as important to Black Culture by simply entering the name and city of the landmark, while our app does the hard work and retrieves all the information automatically!
How we built it
The frontend of our app was built in Javascript using React. We have our backend components written in Python using Flask. We used multiple APIs in this process, including Google Maps to obtain an interactive street view and a Wikipedia API to automatically gather relevant information and images.
Challenges we ran into
We ran into many challenges at first interfacing with the Google Maps API since authentication and embedding it into a React component proved to be difficult. Additionally, our API calls from the client side ran into network errors at first due to some rendering issues.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We managed to push past the aforementioned problems by researching rendering techniques and pulling our past experience to target the problems at hand. We are proud of how effeciently we were able to interface with the APIs we use to push the effort off of the user and onto our app.
What we learned
We all learned a lot about React, Flask, and interfacing with Cloud APIs.
What's next for ROOTS
We would really like to implement a language translation feature for our text in ROOTS to increase its reach to a wider audience, therefore increasing education.
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