Sea-Sights

Inspiration

We were inspired by transportation and the new completion of the link light rail. Cars use a lot of resources so by directing tourists to use trains we are saving on resources. On top of that we wanted to give a way for tourists to experience some of our favorite parts of the city.

What it does

Our program increases the accessibility of urban tourist spots by recommending tourists many destinations throughout Seattle and a scheduler to help plan their trip. It also displays the Link Light Rail track to help tourists access more efficient transportation to more efficiently experience Seattle.

How we built it

We built our program by using Godot. Essentially there are 3 parts to the project. A scheduler and event planner that gives you a overall, the map and the points of interest. The track is assembled from openstreetmap data.

Challenges we ran into

Actually getting the data for the Light Rail was one of the hardest issues by far we ran into. We initially tried using the Sound Transit site to draw a real-time train representation on the map. By using web scraping to parse each individual string to get the arrival time per stop of the train. We hoped to display how the train was moving in real time to enhance the user experience. Parsing html was really cumbersome and several persistent errors caused us to ditch this approach.

Next we found an api available for the transit system, and managed to access loads of data about the network. Unfortunately an api key issue during the second day prevented us from being able to fully develop the system. Some files from this attempt remain but aren't used.

Rendering the map was another huge issue for us because the quality of the routes was causing a lot of memory and rendering issues. After a lot of trail and error, we ended up switching to using a satellite image scraper plugin which lets us use satellite imagery as the map. Another challenge we ran into was trying to use the ai4life service. The hackathon had a prize for using ai video, but we had difficulties in making a account for the service.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We like our UI and are proud of our good teamwork. Its the first project we managed to work on all together, and it was really fun.

What we learned

We overall gained a better understanding of web design, optimization and organization. Along with this information we experienced many problems while making this project and learned how to cut what doesn't work and stick with what does.

What's next for Sea-Sights

We would like to fix the realtime trains on the map, as they were originally planned. We might need to contact some people to get a functioning api key for onebusaway api.

Built With

• godot
• onebusaway
• soundtransit