Xplore

Inspiration

We were inspired to work on this project because a lot of people nowadays are more anti-social, or have difficulty finding reasons to leave home. We wanted to create an app that gives people a fun reason to be able to go out and explore the world with their friends or family, thus helping them regain their social skills as well as improving their health via the exercise that comes with it.

What it does

This app will tack the location of the user and keep a collection of points for them based on various landmarks or unique locations they may have visited. They can accumulate points by checking in when they reach a new landmark, providing photo verification using the phone camera to take a picture, and in return an AI generates an interesting fun fact, as well as some other useful information about where they have arrived to. After collecting a certain amounts of points users will be able to level up and compete in leaderboards.

How we built it

We build this app using react-native and firebase. We created the front end pages of the app using react-native to represent each of the pages the user would be able to access, and connecting it to a firebase database system to be able to store location information as well as the photos uploaded.

Challenges we ran into

2 of the 3 members of our team are brand new to working with react-native and as such ran into issues early on learning how to set up the main pages. Over time those issues became less present but there were others such as errors when attempting to access the phone camera to take and store the picture, an issue that took a decent chunk of time to fix.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of being able to create a functional app in react-native, particularly since most of us have little to no experience using it and have had prior exposure that did not go as well. We are also proud of getting the camera to operate correctly.

What we learned

We learned a lot about how react-native operates and the rules that need to be followed for it. For example in order to use fonts it is a much more complicated process involving lots of importing compared to using fonts with other programming languages.

What's next for Xplore

We hope to continue working on fine tuning the app and perfecting the system in order to properly generate the experience levels and other game-like features of the app into a more full fledged experience.