Waddling Waves

Inspiration

Following the theme of friendship, community and socialization, our group met for the first time here at McWiCS, and while breaking the ice, a key aspect of ourselves we shared was our MBTI (Myers Briggs Personality Types). We were also intrigued by the provided rubber ducks, and decided that we should create our own duck-themed personality categorizer that uses Gemini API to categorize the user’s personality!

What it does

Waddling Waves is a duck themed personality quiz and categorizer that uses the power of AI to hatch you your own personalized duck profile on our platform. The assessment accounts for many different aspects of the user’s personality, such as favourite media, star signs, and MBTI, and categorizes them into one of the 5 waddles in the pond. Along with the assigned duck society, you also receive your own unique profile, with your very own styled duck. Each aspect of the duck is based off of your answers during the quiz, and cleverly delegated by the AI to best match your vibes. With 2000+ combinations, each duck feels unique and has its own personalized description. These ducks are then displayed in The Pond, where each of the 5 duck types have their own section and you can browse through all the other users who are also categorized, allowing you to connect with similar people in your part of the pond!

How we built it

We categorically delegated different tasks to different group members so that we could all work in parallel with each other based on our strengths and weaknesses. For example, as some of us were more artistically inclined they would develop the custom drawings and ideas for questions. And those who were more comfortable with the technical aspects handled the questionnaire, displays, and interactions. Essentially, we are able to feed the responses of the user into Gemini API as well as provide Gemini with sample profiles and weights of which responses were more tailored to which category with reasonings.

Challenges we ran into

The weighting of the user responses in our Gemini API was challenging as this required a lot of tweaking of individual weightages and required hours of trial and error in order to make sure our AI was as effective as possible. Furthermore, because we prioritised making our product something that would feel more real and be more aesthetically cohesive, all assets were created by ourselves through digital drawings, hand drawn fonts, custom CSS.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that despite using a lot of technical aspects and AI, we were able to draw the line of what we could do ourselves given the time constraints of the hackathon allowing our product to feel like something that the user could connect closer with and have a laugh over. Furthermore, we created over 2000 possible combinations of character customizations which ensures that everyone is able to compare and contrast their own ducks with their friends, allowing the users to further develop a friendship and feeling of closeness with one another.

What we learned

We learned to take a step back and realised that we don’t have to make something with many features and technically complex aspects, we realized that we could use our short amount of time to create something that creates a very good user experience as at the end of the day the main purpose is to create something which can build a friendship and sense of community. We also learned how to delegate tasks efficiently in a group based on individual skills. Lastly as we are a fairly inexperienced group we were able to learn a lot about how to use an API to efficiently automate tasks and to our advantage, as well as learned all about using Git to effectively collaborate with one another.

What's next for Waddling Waves

The next step for Waddling Waves is making it public, so that our service can be utilized and reach more people through the internet. We also want to add more questions to the quiz so that the AI can better analyze and create more personalized profiles for users.