Souvenir

Learn to remember far beyond what you could have imagined, simply by walking through a virtual world

Comment

Inspiration

The memory palace, also known as the method of loci, is a technique used to memorize large amounts of information, such as long grocery lists or vocabulary words. First, think of a familiar place in your life. Second, imagine the sequence of objects from the list along a path leading around your chosen location. Lastly, take a walk along your path and recall the information that you associated with your surroundings. It's quite simple, but extraordinarily effective. We've seen tons of requests on Internet forums for a program that can generate a simulator to make it easier to "build" the palace, so we decided to develop an app that satisfies this demand — and for our own practicality, too.

What it does

Our webapp begins with a list provided by the user. We extract the individual words from the list and generate random images of these words from Flickr, a photo-sharing website. Then, we insert these images into a Google Streetview map that the user can walk through. The page displays the Google Streetview with the images. When walking near a new item from his/her list, a short melody (another mnemonic trick) is played based on the word. As an optional feature of the program, the user can take the experience to a whole new level through Google Cardboard by accessing the website on a smart device.

How we built it

We started by searching for two APIs: one that allows for 3D interaction with an environment, and one that can find image URLs off the web based on Strings. For the first, we used Google Streetview, and for the second, we used a Flickr API. We used the Team Maps Street Overlay Demo as a jumping off point for inserting images into street view. Used JavaScript, HTML, CSS

Challenges we ran into

All of us are very new to JavaScript. It was a struggle to get different parts of the app to interact with each other asynchronously.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Building a functional web app with no prior experience
Creating melodies based on Strings
Virtual reality rendering using Google Cardboard
Website design

What we learned

JavaScript, HTML, CSS

What's next for Souvenir

Mobile app
More accurate image search
Integrating jingles

Share this project:

Updates