What inspired me Growing up in Varanasi, I realized the city is like a living, breathing thing with its own moods. Instead of building another dashboard trying to "fix" urban issues, I wanted to do something different: visualize exactly how the city is feeling. Urbemo maps out the actual emotions of the city using live environmental and traffic data.
How I built it Urbemo is a full-stack web application. I built the backend using Node.js to process live environmental and traffic data streams. From there, I wrote a custom algorithm that translates these raw numbers into a "City Emotion Index." This processed data is then pushed to a responsive frontend, where users can watch the city's mood shift in real-time.
The challenges I faced One of the biggest challenges was fine-tuning the math for the emotion algorithm. I had to spend a lot of time tweaking how the data was weighted at first, a minor traffic jam would make the app think the whole city was having a panic attack! Making sure the real-time data streamed smoothly without lagging the web interface also took quite a bit of optimization.
What I learned This project seriously leveled up my full-stack web development skills. I learned how to handle real-time WebSocket streams, structure a robust backend API, and build a complete system from the data processing layer all the way to a clean user interface.
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