Exgress | Devpost

Inspiration

The original inspiration came from the popular augmented-reality Android-based game "Ingress", in which random strangers around the world team up in factions in the game in order to achieve certain objectives in real life. We took the fundamental augmented-reality (and teamwork!) concept of "Ingress" and decided to add a touch of fitness to it, and out came Exgress (Ingress with Exercises, cleaver, we know).

Just take a quick look at all the sports around you, and it's easy to see that humans simply love to compete. By capturing this essence of competition, Exgress not only promote people to increase their daily amount of exercises, but also feel accomplished with the community while doing so. The app will drive competition and in turn drive people to reach their fitness goals!

What Exgress does

Although Exgress took its roots from the game Ingress, it is first and foremost a fitness app. The application requires the data from a Microsoft Fitness Band. The high-level overview of the application is that upon signing up for Exgress, a user will choose one of two teams. The objective of each team is to capture as many real-life landmarks as they can, while defending the already captured from the other team. All the stats within the Exgress will be derived from the data taken from the Microsoft Fitness Band. We use band stats such as heart rate sensor and the calories counter to formulate how strong a team is at a given time. With these stats, the users can proceed around their neighborhoods and capture the beacons.

How We built it

We built this application on the Android Platform. Throughout the project, we utilized Android Studio, Microsoft Azure as the back-end, Microsoft Fitness Band API, and the Google Maps API.

Challenges We ran into

As none of us are familiar with Android in depth (half of us were actually Android beginners), the initial climb to set-up the project was a lot more difficult then we expected. However, after 36 hours of stackoverflowing, we are really proud of our prototype of Exgress.