Inspiration
Inspired by desktop pets known as Shimeji, the various early 2000s bloats of Bonzi Buddy and the endless distractions of the online world that plagued modern productivity, we wanted to devise a solution to improve the health and wellbeing of people by reducing screen time and endless "doom scrolling".
What it does
These two cute yet legally distinct hand-animated otter mascots can keep track of how much time you spend on social media and other procrastination rabbit holes, and act on it as they see fit. Users are reminded periodically during active browsing to take breaks to drink water and touch grass. Got a looming project deadline and can't afford distractions? Work Mode enables the otters to physically stop you from doom-scrolling or watching YouTube videos for fun. Whether you need to hunker down and crunch or just want some cute otters running on screen, your Otter Co-workers are here to help!
How we built it
The app is built with primarily vanilla Javascript, with HTML and CSS for styling after designing the prototype in Figma, and with Node.js to communicate to OpenAI. The artwork and animations assets were made entirely from scratch in Clip Studio Paint as well.
Challenges we ran into
One of our biggest struggles was aligning the interdisciplinary interests of different team members. Because each team member has different skillsets outside of development, we had to come up with an idea that allowed us to split tasks into what each member preferred. Also, most of the team did not have experience developing Chrome extensions or the specific languages involved, which added an extra layer of difficulty. We also struggled to understand exactly how browser extensions operated and how to integrate proper functionality interacting with webpages.
What we learned and our accomplishments
One of our programmers was learning and working with Javascript for effectively the first time to develop the back end, but was still able to contribute the core function of the extension- the timers of how long is spent on each tab's domains. Overall, being able to implement custom animations in a cleanly designed and cohesive package in such a short time frame is our proudest accomplishment as a group.
What's next for Otter Co-Workers
In the future, we would love to be able to integrate even more functionality with OpenAI. One of our initial goals was to be able to distinguish what website or content (e.g. YouTube videos) was work-relevant versus procrastination. Being able to pull information from the page, feed it to OpenAI, and pass it back to the extension would make it even more accurate, as well as helpful.
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