SightWalker

Inspiration

Imagine this: You're going sightseeing in another city. But planning a tour is hard! There are so many things to do and you really want to make the most out of the short time you are there. At the end of the day your feet are sore from all the walking around. But worry no more: SightWalker is here for the rescue!

What it does

SightWalker provides you with a personalized sightseeing tour based on your preferences, time available, user ratings and distance between sights. And the best thing: It does all of this dynamically so it works in any city you visit!

How we built it

We built SightWalker as a mobile app with flutter as the frontend. In the backend, we used python to query different google APIs for sights data and also to calculate the optimal route.

Challenges we ran into

The algorithm to calculate the routes was way more complex than we thought! It turned out to be a Traveling Purchaser Problem which we then simplified to multiple Traveling Salesperson Problems.

Another difficulty was that three of us never worked with Flutter or developed mobile apps at all!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

One thing we are really proud of is that we found a smart and efficient solution to a difficult routing problem. Especially the ability to scale the application practically right from the beginning is a huge plus.

We're also proud that we managed to work really well as a team, even though most of us did not really know each other before!

What we learned

During HackaTUM we learned a lot about mobile development (see "challenges").

For some of us it was also the first in-person hackathon experience! Learning to organize and develop a functioning prototype in such a short time was a great experience.

What's next for SightWalker

One idea for the future is to crowdsource further content starting from simple things like time spent at locations, reviews up to photos or audioguides. Users will get encouraged to do this via gamification elements (like badges, levels, etc.) or real-life incentives.

Another point is to further optimizie the tour algorithm as it is one of the SightWalkers greatest selling points. Ideas are adding even more user preferences, opening times for sights, and so on.

Additionaly we thought of including restaurants and other food places into the routes. Users would be able to earn coupons by completing sightseeing tours, restaurants and food places would get more customers, resulting in a win-win on all sides!