DubMaps

A side-by-side comparison of DubMaps (left) and Google Maps (right). DubMaps makes knowing the accessible path easy.
A segment of the DubMaps route (left) vs. Google Maps' default walking path (right)
Scan this QR Code to use DubMaps on your mobile phone!

Our Inspiration

Have you ever seen the stairs coming up from the IMA? The amount of stairs on the UW campus is absurd, and sometimes it seems inevitable that the route you take to class means encountering a few stairs. This makes the UW campus especially hard to navigate for those with mobility impairments. We designed our app to help those with mobility impairments better navigate the campus and address the inequitable access to educational facilities at UW.

What it does

Similarly to Google Maps, DubMaps calculates the fastest and most efficient route. However, our app makes sure that route is accessible to those with mobility impairments. Just search for a building on campus, and follow the route visualization on an interactive map along with step-by-step directions on how to reach your destination. DubMaps also enables you to use interactive Google Street View, so you will never get lost.

How we built it

We drafted our design in Figma. We used React.JS to create the web app front-end, which is supported on almost all devices. We made sure our UI looked good on mobile phones to suit our target use-case. We deployed our project using Firebase Hosting. Integrating Github with Firebase was a huge convenience and saved us lots of time. We used the Google Cloud Platform to handle route requests from the front-end. For simpler requests, our front-end made calls directly to the Google Maps API, and for more intricate ones (i.e. route requests), we used Google Cloud Functions written in Java for scaleability and maintainability.

Challenges we ran into

Our intial plan was to use embed our Google Maps application in a Java Swing application, and use a Java Spark backend. We then realized after 10 hours that the browser framework we needed was privatized, forcing us to pivot to React.JS and built the entire application from scratch in the remaining 14 hours.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to leverage Google's Maps API and Maps data to find the most accessible paths without any edge cases or heuristics, meaning we can scale our product to beyond the UW campus with incredible ease.

What we learned

Starting off, we had little knowledge of the React library and the Google Cloud Platform. Rethinking Google Maps seemed like an impossible idea at first, but with the help of the Google Cloud Platform documentation we were able to navigate and leverage their API to accomplish just that.

What's next for DubMaps

We want to use accessible building data to help people with mobility impairments navigate the campus easier. Some of the buildings have entrances and exists on different floors due to the drastic elevation changes found on campus. We can leverage the use of the elevators in the buildings to facilitate equitable access to campus facilities. We then would like to expand beyond the University of Washington into other college campuses and study how ease of accessibility can improve a individuals quality of life.