We often go about our daily lives unaware of those around us, crossing paths with strangers for only a brief instant before continuing on, never to be seen again. Degrees is a project that seeks to reveal how these fleeting moments can unfurl into a complex network of connections and interactions, expanding your social network. We were inspired by the concept of six degrees of separation, the idea that every living being is connected to one another in six steps or less, and wanted to visualize this idea on a large, exponentially-growing scale.
What it does
Degrees will find where you're going, and who you meet. And who who you meet meets. And who who who you meet meet meets. And so on...
In other words, Degrees periodically tracks and stores anonymized location data from everybody using the app, including your path throughout the day. When you and another person cross paths, their paths are added to your map.. As this new contact continues about their day, however, crossing paths with more and more people, these extended intersections are also added to your map, and these new people will cross paths with more people, and so on. By the end of the day, your map will be densely populated with degrees of interactions, creating an intricate piece of art. Then the whole process begins anew the next morning, generating different networks every time.
How we built it
We built Degrees using a React Native frontend with Google Maps integration. Our backend consisted of a Python/Flask backend, hosted on Heroku, with MongoDB as our database (hosted on mLab using Azure services).
We used a graph-based model to design, store, and generate our network(s) of interaction.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
During this hackathon, our frontend team went from having little React Native experience to successfully building an app from the ground up. We especially learned a lot about applying design principles and integrating the Google Maps API into our React Native project.
Our backend team, on the other hand, learned a lot about MongoDB, using Flask to build a working backend and deploying it, and designing fast algorithms to handle large network sizes for interactions.
What's next for Degrees
In the future, we want to polish the frontend and add better animations and cleaner designs. We also want to improve our database schema and iterate upon our backend algorithms to achieve even better runtime performance.
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