Landing page: a map of nearby locations
Selecting a vegetarian friendly restaurant!
Selecting a non-vegetarian restaurant.

WhereCanIEat

Scope

Our project took inspiration from recent conversations with friends and family who have shared difficulties of finding places to eat, whether it was due to dietary restrictions or physical abilities. For this hackathon, we focused on building the app framework and displaying a vegetarian analysis.

Implementation

We developed using Android Studio and Google Cloud Platform, specifically the Maps SDK and Places SDK for Android. We developed an Android app with an embedded map interface. The user can explore nearby locations and when they select a restaurant, a dialog box displays an evaluation of how vegetarian-friendly their menu is. The metric is calculated based on the percentage of menu items that contain meat products.

Impact

Often our lives revolve around the food we eat, they affect emotions and health, they have cultural and religious ties, we share laughs and tears over them. Being able to find a restaurant that accommodates your personal needs can be surprisingly difficult, but also incredibly crucial. Whether it's the lack of dietary information for gluten or the sound design for hard of hearing customers, many factors are inaccessible to people as they are deciding where to go. We aim to combat this lack of information and help make going out to eat more accessible to everyone.

Challenges

A lot of this data would need to be collected at the restaurants, which wasn't feasible in our time limits. But implementing this with possible crowdsourcing techniques would be beneficial.