Y+OUR Memorylane

Inspiration

The place we call home is where our most treasured memories have been made. As a group of international students, the disconnect between us and our home only grows as our memories fade. With this year's theme, we acknowledge the increasing importance of looking back at our roots as our hometowns change and evolve. And so, we developed Memorylane as a way to preserve the sights, history, culture, and most importantly, the memories of the place we hold dear.

What it does

Memorylane offers a collaborative photo album showcasing photos of a particular place at different points in time, with a text introduction to the local landmarks, history and culture. Users will first select any place on Earth, and will then be able to view past images, sourced online and from other users, of that place.

How we built it

The frontend was built with React. After the user selects a location, the backend, which was built with Django, provides the Google Streetview images, text description and location information corresponding to that location. The descriptions are generated using Cohere with a query decomposition strategy that compiles information about physical features, history and heritage into a concise summary. The user-provided images are stored on Firebase.

Challenges we ran into

A major roadblock that we faced was embedding Google Maps and its search feature into our webpage, which was not helped by the fact the little amount of resources out there. We had also spent considerable time ironing out the project scope, which hindered our progress initially.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As we're still new to hackathons, we're happy to have been able to complete our project with most of the goals that we set out in the beginning accomplished. We're also proud of having been able to experiment with, and pick up technologies that we haven't really tried before, and successfully utilised it in our final product!

What we learned

Given our relative inexperience with projects in the past, this event turned out to be quite valuable for us, as we'd learnt how to organise ourselves better to work more efficiently in future hackathons!