Glimpses

Combine all of your favorite memories with those you love onto one giant collaborative map.

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Inspiration

Whenever I go on vacation, what I always fondly look back on is the sights and surroundings of specific moments. What if there was a way to remember these associations by putting them on a map to look back on? We strived to locate a problem, and then find a solution to build up from. What if instead of sorting pictures chronologically and in an album, we did it on a map which is easy and accessible?

What it does

This app allows users to collaborate in real time on making maps over shared moments. The moments that we treasure were all made in specific places, and being able to connect those moments to the settings of those physical locations makes them that much more valuable. Users from across the world can upload pictures to be placed onto a map, fundamentally physically mapping their favorite moments.

How we built it

The project is built off a simple React template. We added functionality a bit at a time, focusing on creating multiple iterations of designs that were improved upon. We included several APIs, including: Google Gemini and Firebase. With the intention of making the application very accessible to a wide audience, we spent a lot of time refining the UI and the overall simplicity yet useful functionality of the app.

Challenges we ran into

We had a difficult time deciding the precise focus of our app and which features we wanted to have and which to leave out. When it came to actually creating the app, it was also difficult to deal with niche errors not addressed by the APIs we used. For example, Google Photos was severely lacking in its documentation and error reporting, and even after we asked several experienced industry developers, they could not find a way to work around it. This wasted a decent chunk of our time, and we had to move in a completely different direction to get around it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of being able to make a working app within the given time frame. We're also happy over the fact that this event gave us the chance to better understand the technologies that we work with, including how to manage merge conflicts on Git (those dreaded merge conflicts). This is our (except one) first time participating in a hackathon, and it was beyond our expectations. Being able to realize such a bold and ambitious idea, albeit with a few shortcuts, it tells us just how capable we are.

What we learned

We learned a lot about how to do merges on Git as well as how to use a new API, the Google Maps API. We also gained a lot more experience in using web development technologies like JavaScript, React, and Tailwind CSS. Away from the screen, we also learned to work together in coming up with ideas and making decisions that were agreed upon by the majority of the team. Even with being friends, we struggled to get along super smoothly while working through our issues. We believe that this experience gave us an ample amount of pressure to better learn when to make concessions and also be better team players.

What's next for Glimpses

Glimpses isn't as simple as just a map with pictures, it's an album, a timeline, a glimpse into the past, but also the future. We want to explore how we can encourage more interconnectedness between users on this app, so we want to allow functionality for tagging other users, similar to social media, as well as providing ways to export these maps into friendly formats for sharing that don't necessarily require using the app. We also seek to better merge AI into our platform by using generative AI to summarize maps and experiences, but also help plan events and new memories for the future.

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