Scaape

A geosocial app that helps you find people in your city

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Inspiration

Humans are social beings, hence socializing and meeting new people is an impulsive part of our nature, but due to this recent pandemic which has kept us stuck in our houses for more than a year now, we are impotent to carry out this natural habit of ours. Now, As humans we tend to feel abandoned quite easily, it's like a trait of us like while going out for a walk, touring a new city, or even going to the gym, we seek for the company to keep our boredom away, but we can’t always be surrounded by people who are ready to accompany us wherever we wanna go, hence we propose the concept of an application called Scaape which help us to find a company who appreciate the same interests as we do. So, Let’s escape with Scaape.

What it does

With Scaape we intend to help you meet new people around your place, with the same interest and hobbies as you, who may accompany you in your daily walks, gym, or tour to a new city or landmark. With Scaape you can create an event or as we like to call it ‘Scaape’ and people around your place can join the event to give you company. You can create a Scaape for whatever you like from going out to try out a new hangout location to just wanting to have a walk with some people, no matter how silly it is, if it’s something related to meeting people, we got you covered.

  • Users can sign in with their Google id after which they will be asked with some details
  • Another unique feature that Scaape provides is a ‘vaccination badge’, if the user is twice vaccinated (they’ll need to provide his/her vaccination certificate), Scaape shows a verified badge after the name - and hence users can ensure their health securities as well.
  • Explore the map where all your nearby scaapes are shown. Use the map to view scaapes that are close to you and scaapes that are trending.
  • Users can create a scaape once logged in, a Scaape is basically like an event. You can provide a name, description, location, activity type, date and time for the Scaape and it will be published for the people near your Scaape location with interest in the same activity to join
  • When a scaape is confirmed a group chat is created where all the people participating in a particular scaape can chat with each other for better conversation and planning
  • If you want to join a scape you can go to the home screen where you will be provided with a live feed of scaapes according to the activities you like and your location
  • Using the profile page, users can keep track of their personal information and their previous scaapes

How we built it

Scaapes use live video and sharing to create a global community. While the obvious usage of the platform would occur at a scaape gathering in real life, the platform is intended to be community driven. Members of the scaape can share their lives and stories with one another using live video. Scaape uses AWS Wavelength for live video streaming.

In order to achieve low latency video streaming, we built a virtual private cloud (VPC) in the wavelength zone (North Virginia region) and routed all network traffic through a telecommunications provider. For the server we used the RTMP (Real-Time Messaging Protocol), NGINX server to ingest RTMP video streams. The video stream was broadcasted using HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) to the client application.

To find the nearby scaapes on maps screen we created our own bounding box algorithm to get a list of nearby scaapes, sorted based on popularity and member count.

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Challenges we ran into

  • Designing and implementing the Algorithm that will find out the nearby scaapes near a particular latitude and longitude is quite challenging.
  • Original rtmp package provided by flutter was not workable, so we Implement our custom rtmp package for Live streaming.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Unique problem statement: We were able to solve one of the most challenging problems that anybody visiting a new place faces: staying in contact with the locals. We may offer a way out of this dilemma by helping people in getting to know about the new or old city and meeting new people. Integration of maps: What could be better than envisioning where you're going and tracking it on a map? We were able to effectively incorporate maps into Scaape to track your and your friends' moves during the trip.
  • Live video streaming: When you're Scaaping away, don't leave anyone behind. With live streaming, you can continuously share your fun and make your friends a little jealous and show the rest of the world that part of the city.
  • Continuous feedback: We were always reaching out to people outside of our group in order to gain a fresh viewpoint and improve the overall experience of our app. We were able to resolve all of their issues and create a cleaner app that was free of bugs. You can find the apk here

What we learned

The information and expertise we obtained will be extremely useful in the completion of this project, as well as any future ones. Not only did we obtain technical abilities, but we also learned how to lead a team and collaborate. We learnt everything there is to know about EC2 instances. From a technical standpoint. AWS Wavelength integrates AWS compute and storage services into 5G networks, enabling developers to build, deploy, and scale ultra-low-latency applications.

What's next for Scaape

  • We can integrate payment options for clubs or event organizers who can create their scaape and people can join them.
  • We can integrate the Instagram profile with the scaape profile so that it helps users to choose their hangout partner more easily.
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