Reviewary

Leave a virtual you to guide strangers

Inspiration

When looking into Mapillary to familiarize ourself with it, we think Mapillary is such a cool project that users can capture places with a camera, then upload to Mapillary. We want these users to get to know each other too, since they are such great contributors to the project. Rather than just navigating around or uploading street view to Mapillary, we can enable users to leave their thoughts about the place they visited. These thoughts can be a guidance or a review that can be helpful for other users when they visit the same place.

What it does

The app allows user to explore places and leave a thoughts that can guide the next person. A 3D character is rendered to describe the thoughts and placed on the street.

How we built it

We use React.js for the most part, alongside with Mapillary.js and MapBox GL for longitude and latitude detection. Three.js is used to render 3D characters and user data is attached to each of them.

Challenges we ran into

We weren’t sure whether we’re able to implement this application, so we spent lots of time researching into it. It’s feasible! Until the last day of the hackathon, we met up with Mapillary mantainers and received some guidance from them.

Accomplishments that we’re proud of

We’re able to finish the most of the application that we planned to have in the beginning.

What we learned

We learned a lot more about Mapillary, the OSS project that we’ll be working on in the next few weeks.

What’s next for Reviewary

There are a lot of things we want to do for Reviewary. A backend server can be integrated to persist user data and authenticate/authorize users. Instead of assigning user a starting point, we want to give users the flexibility to chose a starting point on the map. 3D characters are heavy in general, so optimization is needed to boost up the application.