Impromptu

Inspiration

Inspired by fostering connection, exploration, and mini side quests, we wanted to create a fun and interactive way for you to stay in touch and connected through a simple activity that anyone can complete together, regardless of their location.

Initially inspired by the tradition of sending my friends photos of random heart shapes items I encounter on my commute, as an effort to stay connected with friends and keep my eye out for interesting things in everyday life, Esha's motivation to encourage connection and exploration even when life gets busy, led us to create a scavenger hunt mobile app that gets you going out, trying new things, spotting views "together", while apart.

What it does

It's an app that prompts users with 3 "hunts" for the day, ranging from basic finds like "capture the sunset" to "your favorite place" and everything in between. Users aim to find and take a photo that meets one of the three daily scavengers to maintain a streak, explore, and see what everyone else has found.

After you snap a photo or upload one from your camera roll, it is assessed by AI to ensure that it meets the prompt expectations. You'll also receive some live feedback on your photo. Successful photos are then shared with your network, and you can view a gallery of your friends' completed finds.

How we built it

We used React for the frontend, UI, and Firebase for the backend to manage our database. As React is mainly used for web development, we developed the website, then planned to "wrap" it to be deployed as a mobile iOS/Android app using Capacitor. We also utilized Tailwind CSS for styling and Framer Motion for animations.

Challenges we ran into

We had a lot of ambitious ideas and interesting designs we would have loved to implement; however, due to time constraints, despite making some progress on our landing page design (and Esha spending a considerable amount of time developing it), we had to scrap it and try a new idea.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are really proud of how the final product functionally turned out. It's exciting to see it work as we hoped, and the range of features we came up with and implemented along the way, which we didn't consider beforehand, was a fun process. We're also really happy about being able to use a range of foreign tools and with how the app functions, and is made accessible.

What we learned

A majority of the tools were brand new to us, so the entire process was a learning experience. While we have tinkered with React here and there, Firebase, Gemini APIs, and ElevenLabs were all new tools we learned existed and can be used for very helpful functionalities across a range of possibilities.

What's next for Impromptu

Moving forward, we would love to integrate WidgitKit into the project so that posted photos can be viewed on a widget. We also look forward to actually implementing the wrapper and fully converting the app to be mobile.