IamCold | Devpost

IamCold UI
Starting Point and Destination Selection Fields
Outdoor Navigation
Indoor Navigation
Course Schedule

Inspiration

What’s one word to describe the Waterloo campus in winter? Cold. In 2 words, very cold. As the seasons change from summer to fall, and fall to winter, the campus gradually changes from the geese-swamped summer paradise to a cold, frozen, winter wasteland. Although the campus has thoughtfully built sky bridges leading from building to building to protect students from the harsh winter weather, many students have no idea how to navigate them or even where to find them! This means, to move between classes, many students must brave long journeys through the sub-zero temperatures and grating winds of ... the outdoors... And that’s not it. Once students finally make it to their destination buildings, they must navigate the endless maze of hallways to reach their classes, and in buildings where room 1025 is next to 1002, this is no easy task. After the trouble of reaching their class, students only have a brief recess before they must once again forego the same challenges to reach their next class. As a team of three first-year students, we have often faced many of these hardships just in the first few months of school alone. Although it might be less of an issue for experienced battle-hardened upper years, us first years must pull precious time from our already precariously balanced study-sleep schedule to navigate the labyrinthine campus. What’s more, even upper years can still find shorter indoor routes around the campus. Now... Imagine... What if there was an app that could solve all these problems?

What it does

IAmCold™ will feature a detailed indoor map of each building on campus - complete with an indoor GPS to direct you through the complex network of hallways. When possible, our indoor navigational app will take advantage of the web of interconnecting sky bridges to help get you to your destination warm, dry, and away from whatever murk awaits outside. Now, navigational apps can be inconvenient to use when you have to manually enter your destination each time you’re in a hurry. So, to optimize ease-of-use, students will be able to log in using their student emails and import their class schedules on UWPortal.

How we built it

The web-based indoor routing service is built using the Django REST framework and uses GeoDjango’s geospatial framework combined with a spatial database built using the PostGIS extension for PostgreSQL as its backend. The maps are rendered using Django template components with the OpenLayers Api and Bootstrap CSS. The routing service takes start coordinates with the floor, and end coordinates with floor, and calculates and returns an optimal route complete with walk time. This is done through the PostgreSQL database mentioned earlier, using the pgRouting extension to calculate the Dijkstra shortest path between the 2 points. The user will also be able to select between stair/elevator/outdoor route preferences, where each preference will apply a change to the algorithm calculating the shortest route to provide the desired change in path.

Challenges we ran into

A challenge we ran into was connecting the different hosting platforms (we were using React Native as a cross platform, alongside Android App Studio and Flutter). Also, many times the emulators would not work because of connection errors that usually lacked a comprehendible description to solve them. Some issues we had on the backend side was working with REST APIs and POST requests, since certain parameters needed to be passed in in very specific ways for data to be interpreted correctly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We really liked the way our layout for the User Registration screen turned out. It is the most intuitive and polished part of the frontend. Also, we are proud of getting the Waterloo log in requests to be working properly.

What's next for IamCold

In the future we are hoping to enhance the indoor gps to have functionalities that checks for crowd and line lengths. Asides from planning the best route from class to class, or from your current location to your next class, we want to give users a reminder when it's time to head off, helping you arrive early enough to finally grab that front-row seat. In the future, we hope to be able to add support for full outdoor campus-wide navigation, integrating bus routes and times to optimize efficiency and accessibility