Inspiration
As Covid restrictions are loosened, we wanted to create an app that helped people transition back to socializing in person and more.
What it does
When using ChatArea, a user can broadcast and view short lived messages to everyone in a certain radius. This facilitates encounters with strangers or coordinating spontaneous events with people we are not familiar with (yet!). ChatArea also features a mapview interface so that users can know where are the best places to meet new people.
How we built it
ChatArea is a mobile app developed with the React Native framework and the messaging functionalities are enabled by a Node.js server using websocket connections
Challenges we ran into
One challenge was to selectively broadcast messages only to users in the sender's vicinity
Accomplishments that we're proud of
One big accomplishement in this project was to successfully display to the users the live locations of all other users in their area
What we learned
We needed to learn how to properly handle websocket connections in a react environment
What's next for ChatArea
ChatArea is a game-changer in terms of interacting with your environment. A clever feature to add to this concept would be to let businesses and establishements integrate chat assistants into their premises where it would be harder to serve everyone (eg: a museum tour guide or an item finder in a grocery store).
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