artsee

Making public art more public by leveraging GCP & municipal open data sets

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Inspiration

Public art is abundant all around the country's cities. Finding these locations can be tricky, though: there is no way to browse these points on a map despite publically available datasets that include them. artsee does this on top of using street view to allow users to virtually visit these public art installations without the plane ticket.

What it does

artsee displays a google map with points of public art in LA, Nashville, Norfolk, and Austin (NYC temporary exhibits work when cross-origin resource sharing allowed). If you are in these areas, allowing your browser to access your location will show you where you are in relation to the art and center the map at your location. Otherwise, the app starts in Nashville, TN. Clicking on the red points will open an info window with information about the art in street view as well as in map view.

How I built it

Good old html/css/javascript & jQuery as well as GCP for the maps and geocoding APIs. I also got the data from open data sets for different cities.

Challenges I ran into

There weren't more cities with good public art data sets! Otherwise, I would have loved to add support for more cities. Also, the geolocation API !== geocoding API!

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I have a project that I was able to accomplish though I was not able to start until halfway through time that I genuinely enjoyed using

What I learned

I worked more with Google Maps and SODA/working with JSON responses from APIs & improved my understanding on writing clean code in javascript. I also appreciate the Google street view & maps API more now:)

What's next for artsee

Use the same concept for a location-based AR app :) & fix the bug that makes you refresh 3 times for it to work lol. Maybe add a suggested walking route to link all the points as well

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