crowdart | Devpost

crowdart

Inspiration

reddit.com/r/place

What it does

crowdart explores collaborative art without communication. Online users are matched randomly with each other to work semi-anonymously on a digital canvas. Users have 24 hours and limited ink to express themselves artistically and collaboratively.

How we built it

We used Swift to design our iOS app and Firebase to hook up the authentication and art database.

Challenges we ran into

We faced a wide range of challenges that paved way for results that we couldn't have otherwise arrived at.

Technical challenges we encountered include real time data processing, integrating Firebase correctly into our app and the limitations of user experience development in Swift.

Social challenges such as giving people purpose, providing an engaging community and managing abuse of the service. Especially restrictive was our design vision which was based on withholding communication between users besides interacting with each other on a canvas. We decided not to implement a forum, a chat client nor a social network to explore the social engineering discoveries that would rise from collaborative art.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We executed the idea and we each got to explore new technologies. We thought we wouldn't be able to complete a major technical part but we ended up pulling through as a team and are proud to ship crowdart to you!

What we learned

We learned that while our scope was manageable, there is so much involved in iOS development than meets the eye!

What's next for crowdart

crowdart will continue to improve until all of the functionalities in our initial vision come true. We've planned small such as including functional personal and public galleries as well as dreamed big about expanding the collaborative art experiment to encompass collaborative music, poetry and prose. This isn't the last you'll see of crowdart. Until we hit our ambitious targets, we will continue creating and sharing digital art.