Inspiration
We wanted to create a platform where nature enthusiasts could go to find a community and share their passion with their friends. Simultaneously, we wanted to encourage people who are usually not active to go out, explore, and get fit. We wanted to show people that regardless of their location and the gear they have, there are numerous opportunities for them to explore their surroundings.
What it does
This mobile app gamifies hiking and nature exploration. TrailQuest takes the location, interested range of distance, and owned hiking gear and challenges users with hiking quests comprising three suitable trails. Users can attempt multiple quests at a time and compare and compete with their friends to complete them the fastest to earn rewards. But let's excite things more! We also add side quests and activities like visiting key points on the trail, photographing season-specific flowers, or finding other wildlife. Besides the challenging aspects of the app, it is an informative tool that matches suitable trails to users depending on their various dynamics.
How we built it
Our project comprises front-end mobile application development and APIs to connect maps and trail information. We built the app using React Native, integrated information from the backend using Firebase, used Google Maps API to display the trails, RapidAPI to filter trails around the individual, and chat GPT to cater to the needs of everyone's specific gears and create a recommendation that generates a quest!
Challenges we ran into
- Front-end: We struggled with configuring the ScrollView to display the list of quests and friends a user have.
- Front-end: A lot of components took longer than expected in organizing and styling to give the most pleasing user experience.
- Back-end: We encountered many difficulties loading our specific data and creating the pipeline that drove our application. The pipeline consisted of getting the user location, sending it to rapidAPI, sending the data from that to chatGPT, and then sending the result into Firebase.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are really proud of how our app looks. With smooth animations and an extensive feature list, we truly like what we came up with. Even though we were unable to fully complete it, we did our best and are proud of what we were able to build in such a short amount of time!
What we learned
Two of our less experienced team members learned how to work with frontend development using React Native and were exposed to working with Firebase. Firebase was truly a novel experience along with really prompt engineering GPT to our specific needs. Creating and coming up with the backend pipeline helped us learn how to streamline tasks and how to really integrate multiple technologies into one app!
What's next for TrailQuest
There is still much that can be expanded upon with TrailQuest. Once we get enough users, we could extract data from their logs to refine our database instead of solely basing it on external information. This helps in the increase of information relating to nature exploration, improving fitness and safety. We also really need to finish all our features we committed to and flesh them out. If time had truly permitted, we would have had much more interactivity in the maps portion of it and would have fleshed out our side quests.
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