loop. | Devpost

Inspiration

As young adults, we get it. A lot of times, it's just hard to go out and socialize. Sometimes, it's because you just moved in to a new city where you know nothing about the different possible places and activities. And sometimes, it can have other reasons, like being scared of interactions or the number of interactions decreasing, especially for the elderly. And this is why we created _ loop. _ .

What it does

_ loop. _ is the modern solution for loneliness. It helps people connect and socialize without having it seem forced or awkward. It offers several features:

First, in order to start using the website, the user has to give their name and age. This information helps users connect based on a certain age for example. Then, the user can start enjoying the website.

On one hand, users are able to announce events they want to host or outing ideas they have and choose a participant limit. A post of the event with all relevant details is shown on other users' interfaces. Anyone who wants to join has to click the "Join in!" button in order to reserve a place.

On the other hand, the website itself shows countless suggestions of activities and places one can go to in the city in the _ Explore _ tab. These are either posted by people or generated by the algorithm. This gives users ideas in case they don't have any, so that they still feel like they want to go out and try new things instead of doing nothing at home. These are sorted by category, e.g. "Art", "Sport", "Nature", so that it's easier to look for something to do. In the category "Exclusive", users are shown diverse exclusive options, like Christmas markets, or exclusive shows and art expeditions. And, if they like a specific idea, they can directly start a post inviting people to join in.

Now comes the importance of our _ Map _ feature. All event postings are marked as dots on the map. When the user clicks on a dot, a pop-up with the time, place, exact location, and the number of people coming appears. If the user then wants to join, they can easily click the "Join in!" button. This map feature is crucial since it helps the user see what's taking place around him, making it easier to just choose something that's near without having to type the location anywhere to see where exactly it is.

After each event a user joins, they get a list of the names of people who were there with the option to send a request for exchanging contacts via the website in case they forgot to do that in person. That way, there is no more getting to meet cool people, forgetting to exchange contacts and never seeing them again. We intentionally decided against implementing a search feature in order to motivate people to meet in person.

And lastly, we have a _ Friends _ tab. Here, the user can see a list of all the people they added on the website.

How we built it

For the frontend, we used React and Typescript with Tailwind CSS. We did the Deployment with Firebase. We used a CI Pipeline with GitHub actions.

Challenges we ran into

We tried to implement Augmented Reality in our Map so that users can see arrows in their surroundings leading them to the location. However, it was more time consuming than we thought, in addition to library problems.

Apart from that, our team consists of people with different knowledge levels, which definitely made working on this project a bit challenging. However, as a team, we handled this perfectly and found a healthy balance between moving forward with the project and helping each other learn and grow.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Roughly working MVP. Very simple, interactive and user-friendly interface.

What we learned

We learned that having people wit different knowledge levels on one team is not necessarily a bad idea. On one hand, people with less technical knowledge still had very creative minds and contributed to the idea. On the other hand, they learned a lot and improved their programming skills thanks to the cooperation of the more advanced team members.

We also learned that working on such projects should not be stressing. We definitely enjoyed working together and had a really great and healthy environment overall, which definitely helped all of us to grow and learn a lot.

Our github link: https://github.com/JI20/loop