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  welcome to tryangl

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tryangl

A social media space empowering users to seek out new experiences.

Inspiration:

College is a time to explore new things, yet it can also be a time of loneliness. Without our long-established friend groups, it becomes scary to go out and see what the world has to offer. What if there was a social media site that could bring back that spark of curiosity by providing you with friends that will push you forward and watch your back?

What it does:

Our app takes in your username and lets you participate in activities posted by someone else or create your own activity. You’re awarded points if you post a picture of the activity with your matched friends, which is verified by facial recognition software. If all of you are present, you receive points. If you fail to finish the activity, then your point count is penalized.

The points system is a gamification ploy to incentivize people to continue to go out and try new things. You will lose points if not everyone shows up, so there is also peer pressure to attend events so that the entire group can benefit.

How we built it:

On the frontend side:

We first developed the basic buttons for entering data and choosing from a dropdown menu. We then worked on using toggling to enter different parts of our “menu”. After this, we implemented the verification using pictures and storing the data while awarding points. We ended with front-end development and making the app cleaner, more accessible, responsive, and mobile-ready with a manifest.json.

As for JS, we used top of the line standards from ES6 including Promises and the new Fetch API to handle asynchronous data flow effortlessly. We also used the new template tag for efficient DOM replication.

On the backend side:

We first established a SparkJava server. We then created an MVC architecture and persistence method using the filesystem Then, we added a simplified Haar face detection algorithm to award points.

Challenges:

Image recognition was difficult due to some outdated programs but we fixed this with new software. The CSS styling was not working properly for different sizes of the screen but we used a few extra media queries to make this work properly. Using the server was tricky as well. as we had to continuously communicate changes in the API.

However, we had efficient task management and good team coordination, and we worked our way consistently and gradually towards solving the problems and successfully building our product!

Accomplishments and Learning:

We really pushed our boundaries and learnt several new things through this project. We exchanged skill sets and acquired new ones. The fact that we were able to successfully get the app running was a validation of our persistent effort.

Improvements:

Currently, the points are merely brownie points. We would like to have a virtual shop where you can exchange stuff like for Fortnite's V-Bucks. Another improvement would be to add actual user authentication instead of the honor system we are using now. For practical use of this app, users will need to be connected based on their location proximity, and be able to chat with each other to discuss meeting times.

Built With

• html5
• java
• javascript