Ghost Runner

People struggle to be active and social during COVID-19. Through the gamification of running, Ghost Runner sparks users’ competitiveness and uses social motivation to help them improve their health.

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Inspiration

The generational novelty of the pandemic has presented society with many opportunities for improvement. Given the uncertainty and health concerns that the past year has presented, our team wanted to create an application that would address a problem that many people currently faced.

What it does

Our application allows users to record their runs in the form of ghosts (playable recorded runs) which record the distance that a user travels at certain times and allows their runs to be replayed and challenged by other users to beat their times. This helps to create a feeling of community by working out with (or against) your friends, even if you can't physically be together. The app allows you to manage your own profile, friends list, track your best ghost runs, challenge other runners with similar average speeds, and track your location in real-time.

How we built it

We built the app on react-native and specifically using Expo to help deploy and create an environment for developing and testing in. First, we spent a lot of time going through our idea, identifying what needs users would have, and what would draw them to using our app. Then, we needed to get the fundamentals of the app down, creating our navigation pages, getting the map working and responsible, and then storing data, sending/responding to queries, and calculating distances and speeds to provide the user with a great running experience.

Challenges we ran into

Having not had much experience using react-native, some of the fundamental concepts had a steep learning curve, taking up a lot of time using trial and error to find how certain concepts work. Additionally, we had trouble creating a functional API to manage the database, but we found we were able to use SSL to get it working.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

One of our members participated in Hack Western last year, and was unable to finish an entire project o have a full working prototype. This year, we worked efficiently and were able to lock down a strong idea that gave us the motivation and experience we needed to create this fully working prototype that we are all proud to have been a part of.

What we learned

Before this - mobile development had always seemed daunting, having a lot of knowledge and technologies needed in order to get involved. Diving into the deep end with this project showed us that it isn't as intimidating as it seems, and we definitely feel more confident bringing the skills we learned this weekend into future projects and development.

What's next for Ghost Runner

Some things we would love to add to Ghost Runner are the ability to have real-time races against friends/other people around the world, telling you in real-time whether you or they are ahead at the time. Additionally, we would like to have the capability to record more than just one race per person so that users can get analytics based on their past races, and to plot the route that they actually run on the map as they do it.

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