Firefly

We are devoted to giving people more opportunities to discover and bond over the hidden beauties of our world that we miss everyday.

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Inspiration

With technology capturing our attention in every waking moment, how many beautiful sceneries have we walked past. If we had just looked up and let our eyes wander, how many hidden gems of life could we have captured? Thus, our goal with Firefly is to give people more opportunities to discover and bond over the hidden beauties of our world that we miss everyday.

What it does

Firefly has two primary functionalities: Its site creating feature allows users to post hidden gems that they find, and its scavenger hunt feature gives the users the opportunity to find these sites and contribute their own picture to a collage of past users' images, providing exciting and rewarding exploration challenges.

Beyond these basic features, Firefly is an immersive user experience. The mobile app allows users to engage in scavenger hunts, interact at various campsites like old friends swapping stories, and leave their mark in the community collage. We hope to build stories, bridging gaps in time within local communities - once you get close enough to a campfire, whether it’s just a pile of kindling or a roaring flame, you connect to the humans who were there before you.

How we built it

Our frontend and backend together contain 3 unique parts. We made our frontend using react-native and expo, allowing for quick testing and refreshing. Our backend consists of both Firebase, which we use to store images and JSON data, and a remote server hosted on Linode, which we use as a proxy between Firebase and our frontend. While the firebase stores, the Linode server processes images and organizes data with Python to synthesize community items like collages.

Challenges we ran into

We encountered many challenges along the way, some technical, others team-oriented. For technical challenges, many members of our team had never worked with react-native or even javascript before, so embarking on this project was a daunting task. For team challenges, fleshing out ideas, distributing work, and most importantly learning to prioritize goals and ideas were challenging. However, through a shared love for learning, we were able to make progress towards our goals.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Something we’re really proud of is our ability to integrate various different services towards building one project. We loved weaving together different systems and platforms to create powerful combinations, and it was very exciting actually seeing the fruits of our labor at work! We could not be more proud of the project we’ve created together.

What we learned

Our group came into this hackathon with widely varying skill sets and passions, but in the (many many) hours we spent coding, debugging, and pitching ideas, we learned from each other. We all learned new coding concepts, languages, ideas. And, more importantly, we learned through experience how to effectively collaborate and divide and conquer.

What's next for Firefly

There are many specific features that we simply did not have the time to implement. Below are a few:

  • A list view on main page to show nearby places, sortable by user-defined variables such as distance or popularity.
  • Polished animations for a more lively experience, such as messages rising from the campsite like smoke.
  • User profiles to keep track of fun stats like number of campsites built, found, or contributed to. Could also use this to prevent multiple submissions from one user to the same campsite.
  • Adding custom font families/styles to reinforce a cozy visual feel.
  • Integrating Android compatibility.

However, an overall direction we envision with Firefly is a community building platform where people are encouraged to contribute to local communities centered around their hidden local sceneries. For this direction, we want users to be able to build something together as a local community. While we have realized this idea to some degree as a collage of images, an extension could be people building a scrollable panorama or 3D view of these treasured sceneries. The more people contribute, the clearer or more “complete” the view becomes!

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