Glimpse.

Inspiration

Our inspiration comes from the book Lantern of Lost Memories written by Sanaka Hiiragi. In our busy lives, we often forget meaningful memories and fail to take time to process our emotions and feelings. Whether it was navigating stressful school days or dealing with unexpected challenges, we often found ourselves overwhelmed or unable to fully understand why we felt the way we did. On our bus ride to McMaster, we even found ourselves bonding over moments that an application like Glimpse could have helped us recognize moments where we brushed away our feelings and ignored our triggers simply because we were always on the move. Thus leading us into our journey of creating a tool that acts as a snapshot of our lives while integrating technology; helping us recognize our emotional triggers, and enabling us to reflect and grow.

What it does

Glimpse tracks your emotions throughout the day, capturing screenshots of your screen when your emotions change to pinpoint the triggers behind these shifts. It creates a vibrant timeline of your emotions, represented by colors, with snapshots of those moments displayed as polaroid-style memories. At the end of the day, users are prompted to reflect on their emotions, exploring what they felt, why they felt that way, and how their body responded to those emotions.

By helping users connect their emotions to specific moments, Glimpse fosters emotional awareness and helps build emotional regulation, encouraging users reflect and understand their feelings in a world where we're often too busy with school, work, or life to pause and acknowledge our emotions.

How we built it

Our tech stack includes: ReactJS, Firebase, Python, Deepface

For the front end, we focused on creating a seamless and visually engaging experience. The timeline was designed to feel personal and customizable, allowing users to see their emotional journey unfold. On the backend, we worked on detecting the users emotions and fluctuations in the users emotions. When we detected a high enough change, we took a snapshot of the user at the moment and their screen. We send that information to firebase to store and back to our front end to display as Polaroids to our users.

Challenges we ran into

Ideation: Finding a project that resonated with both of us was a challenge. We wanted something meaningful and relatable to our struggles while being exciting enough to push us to work harder.

Technical Complexity: Recording the screen and capturing screenshots based on mood changes turned out to be more complicated than expected. Balancing real-time emotion detection with efficient resource usage was another significant hurdle.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

centering a div tbh...
Bringing our idea to life in a visually appealing and functional prototype.
Overcoming technical hurdles related to real-time mood tracking and timeline visualization.
Creating something that feels deeply personal and meaningful, knowing it could help others in their emotional journey.

What we learned

After completing the project, we talked a lot about what we took out of the project. For the both of us, we found it most surprising that we gained a lot insight on how important it is to examine what influences your mood changes, and how to properly regulate them. We learned a lot about Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and wished that we would've been able to implement some techniques if we had more time. Also that we both are really really picky with trying to pick an idea!

What's next for Glimpse.

Implementing collage montage of it, as if your day was literally flashing before your eyes. Adding additional photos from your camera roll!! Image analysis & machine learning to see exactly what causes certain moods versus others, to help identify triggers.

With Glimpse, we hope to empower users to take charge of their emotional health, fostering awareness, reflection, and growth through the use of technology.