Wayfinder

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  Map Page

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  Collection Page

Inspiration

With recent trends of endless feeds and mindless doomscrolling, we wanted a way for us to form connections with the world around us by incentivizing exploration. Wayfinder is a personal journal of your discoveries at your fingertips, ready for any journey.

What it does

Wayfinder is an image-recognition webapp where users take photos of curious object from their surroundings that have heritage significance. This includes cultural heritage such as art, architecture, and artifacts, and natural heritage such as fossils, geology, and landforms. Core Features:

1. Image Recognition
2. Collection View
3. Collection Map
4. Profile and Friends List

How we built it

• Database: SQLite
• Backend: Flask
• Authentication: Auth0
• Image Recognition: Gemini API
• Frontend: React 19 + Vite
• Deployment: Railway

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest challenge was to effectively integrate Auth0 authentication into our program, including safely storing the Auth0 keys. Getting Auth0 to work through the different devices and webapp meant that we had to verify the JWTs server-side against Auth0 own JWKS endpoints rather than just trusting whatever information the client sent.
Another was designing the SQL database schema so that it had the appropriate information for each part of our architecture. Choosing what information to include or omit had lasting consequences in the rest of our app.
The last challenge that we had to solve was around the UI's multiple features; some of them randomly broke when we changed code in the backend or database, so we had to debug it quite a few times.

Accomplishments that we’re proud of

• Building a working app from scratch in 24 hours
• Dividing project scope and group efficiently
• Managing a growing architecture and adapting as needed
• Deploying the app successfully
• Seeing our vision become reality

What we learned

Since this was our first hackathon, we learned how to collaborate as a team to ship an application from start to finish. First, we tackled the idea and end goal of our project. We broke down the project scope, designated tasks to each teammate, and constantly brainstormed through each step. Further into the project, we discovered how to troubleshoot and assist each other when needed. Finally, we tied it all together, documenting our project, including a README and video demos.

What’s next for Wayfinder

• More achievements
  • Add more achievements such as Deep Diver - Discover 10 Maritime Items, Seasoned Explorer - Discover 10 Landmarks, etc.
• View friends’ collections
  • Users are able to view the entirety of the collections of other users who are on their friends list.
• Weekly challenge
  • Global challenge available for all users, changes weekly.
• Friendly challenge
  • Users are able to make a friendly challenge (ie: ‘Obtain 5 new fossils by the end of the week’) to other users on their friends list.

Built With

• auth0
• flask
• geminiapi
• javascript
• python
• railway
• react
• sqlite
• vite