Virtualso

Event Panel in Virtualso
Main billboard highlighting underrepresented groups

Inspiration

Over the pandemic, our team turned to music for consolation. What we found is that the communities built around music are incredibly strong and welcoming. However, it was hard to discover and join musical communities without face-to-face connections. We built a platform to allow people to explore musical cultures around the world. We aim to free people from their pandemic mindset and guide them to music, either in their hometown or abroad. We are Virtualso, the virtuoso of music events.

What it does

Virtualso highlights musical culture. We gather and organize information about musical events, history, venues, and stores. We also highlight and support underrepresented groups in music, and aim to foster an inclusive global community of music lovers.

How we built it

It all began with a simple sketch. From there, we transferred that idea on to Figma to fully realize our design. Meanwhile, we built a low code backend with Airtable as a content management system for Virtualso's events. Figma's tools allowed us to export CSS, and with React, we were able to combine all of our elements into the webapp you see today.

Challenges we ran into

It wouldn't be a hackathon without challenges. Early on, we had struggles figuring out how we would host Virtualso. Fortunately, GitHub's pages allowed us to configure straightforward React hosting. We also had a hard time setting up our page's CSS, but with Figma's tools, we were able to overcome these roadblocks.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're all proud of our Airtable content management system. Quickly filtering between a number of musical events works like a charm, and it's the exact interaction we hoped our site would have.

What we learned

We gained a lot of valuable experiences from creating Virtualso. Even though DubHacks was moved completely virtual this year, our team was able to collaborate seamlessly with everyone's effort. For example, we aim to communicate as frequently as possible with the aid of Discord and Zoom, and we were not afraid to bring up issues and ask for helps from others. We also learnt how to flesh out an idea into a detailed plan of actions, and further distributed those tasks to each team member. Prioritization is also something we practiced a lot. For example, when deciding between functionality and some styling improvements, sometimes we would have to go with investing time in functionality.

What's next for Virtualso

The future of Virtualso consists of adding resources and events from other cities beside Seattle. Additionally, we will utilize APIs from a given source instead of hard coding each event individually onto our website. Lastly, we noticed that there weren't many history-related musical events. When the project becomes successful, we plan to host these types of events to teach other people about the rich history behind music in every culture.