Inspiration
Our main inspiration was a website called The Thoughts Room. It is an older website that is no longer available, as it went down between 2014 - 2016. It targeted users who had a lot on their mind but nowhere or no one to talk to. The Thoughts Room was a safe, judgment-free space that encouraged users to let go of all their burdens and watch them disappear before their eyes. The website starts by printing strings of encouraging words and instructions to the screen for the user, prompting them to type in the thought box (a text box). As the user inputs a string into the text box, each word falls until it is off-screen. Our project runs similarly to this.
What it does
Sea of Thoughts is a website that was created to facilitate stress relief. It allows users to type their thoughts into a text box and watch them shoot across the sky like shooting stars. Once the user enters a string into the text box and presses enter, one by one, the words will drop slightly below the text box where they will condense into stars and fly off the screen. They are meant to look like and resemble a meteor shower. The background is an animated image of a pixelated sea under the moon in a sky filled with stars. The sea is animated to look as though its waves are moving with a moon in the top right corner, and stars scattered in the sky. There will also be ambient ocean sounds playing in a loop. Another aspect of the project is that it has machine learning. Because we want this website to be used to vent out negative or stressful thoughts, there will be a high possibility of someone writing in something that people may find concerning. We wanted to address this with the machine taking the words entered into the textbox and checking to see if it finds any words that would be within the concerning category. If it finds one and the context is right, a popup window will appear in the mind of the screen giving the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.
How we built it
Our project was built using several coding languages collaborated via Github. We connected the various files to the main branch so that when everyone completed their code, all the files could be linked to and run off one main branch. All that information is then connected to the web under a domain name and hosted off of Google Cloud.
Challenges we ran into
This project was challenging in several aspects. Most of us either did not know or completely understand the programming languages we needed to use i.e., HTML, JavaScript, Python, and CSS. In terms of the background animation, we had issues with the animation and how many frames we needed. Trying to create a demonstration video and other graphics to highlight how our code would execute gave us trouble as well. The cloud web development was difficult as well with us trying to get the website up and running with the information we gave it.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
There were a lot of concepts and skills required that we had not mastered while creating Sea of Thoughts. We are proud of ourselves for learning more about the concepts we previously did not know. In doing this project, we were able to learn how to make input text disappear once the user presses the enter key, how to animate backgrounds, how to draw on a webpage, and jQuery. We are most proud of our determination and perseverance that allowed us to follow through until the end.
What we learned
We learned the hard lesson of what happens when you try to merge branches in Github. We also learned how valuable collaboration is between all team members and to make sure all voices are heard. Overall, we learned how important hackathons can be for students of all kinds, in all stages of their degree.
What's next for Sea of Thoughts
In the future, we would like to have a website link for suicide prevention within the popup window as well as be able to change the background scenes. We would also like to be able to code the words into actual stars with a beam of light following them as opposed to just small circles.
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