MIT Heat Map

Inspiration

We were inspired by the problem of connecting different people at MIT—a place where students and staff are constantly busy—through the spaces that we share. The places and buildings that we spend our time in affect our life in a myriad of ways, so we were very interested in these kinds of questions: Where do we spend most of our time? How do we move throughout the day?

What it does

As you walk around MIT's campus, login to MIT Heat Map and click on your location on the map. Whenever you go to another building, click the new location on the map. We track the time spent at each location and use it to display a heat map of where you spend most of your time on campus. We can also display a path of all the locations you've visited throughout the day. Finally, we aggregate everyone's data and use it to build a 'net' heat map: find out where the MIT community as a whole is spending their time.

How we built it

We used Leaflet, a Javascript library for interactive maps, as the basis of our website, and used various data analysis algorithms (with MongoDB as a database) to generate creative ways to visualize the data.

We mainly used the following technologies:

React.js for the front end.
Leaflet.js for interacting with the map.
Nodejs and Express.js for backend.
MongoDB as a database.

Challenges we ran into

The main issues that we ran into were that of map integration. How do we display and interact with accurate maps? How do we know where the user is? What bins do we use to classify locations? How do we visualize this data? How do we simplify the user's experience? We spent a lot of time thinking about each of these questions and came up with solutions to each one of them.

During the development process, we also ran into many software-related issues such as setting up authentication and deployment that held us up for many hours.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the sleek UI and performance of our website. We believe that our website is a surprisingly powerful tool that's simultaneously easy to use. We particularly love the look of our heat maps after spending a lot of time fine tuning the parameters. Most of all, we believe that our tool is something that can be used by everyone in the MIT community to learn more about themselves and their friends.

What we learned

We learned how to integrate many new technologies (specifically visual maps) that we hadn't learned before into creative ideas that could have real impact on people around us. We learned how to design interactive UI that is simple and efficient. Authentication, Maps, MongoDB are all skills/areas where we significantly improved and feel much more confident using in the future.

We also learned how to manage time and expectations and learned how to choose and build a project that was perfectly suited to the given time period. As we collaborated and worked together, we improved significantly as a team; we are now better at sharing feedback, asking for help, communicating about blockers, and more.