ricky-ma / hotspot

Easily practice social distancing by seeing the busiest crowds in town - and avoiding them

HotSpot 🔥📍

Easily practice social distancing by seeing the busiest crowds in town - and avoiding them

Inspiration

Restaurants are one of the few places today where masks are taken off. Due to the pandemic, people prefer to eat at less crowded places.

What it does

Our app provides a way for users to quickly find less crowded restaurants to dine at while avoiding potential hotspots and super-spreader events. Users are first provided with a heatmap, a large overview of the city where they can decide which areas of the city to avoid at a glance. A simple search operation then displays relative restaurants, where users can view a restaurant's specific crowdedness level and other important details.

How we built it

Restaurant data are queried from Google using the Google Places API and stored in an Apache Cassandra database using DataStax Astra. Since popular-times data does not update very frequently, and in order to conserve computations, we define a Google Cloud Function and using the Google Cloud Scheduler to provide updates to the database hourly. The Android app is built entirely in Java and data is queried from the database using a REST API. We using Google Place Search to perform search operations and the SDK for Google Maps Android development.

What's next for Hotspot

To simplify development and conserve compute credits, we have limited the app to a testing area of just Vancouver, Canada, and only update the database hourly. The app, however, can easily be configured to be deployed around the world with real-time hotspot updates. We believe such an app is immensely useful as Covid-19 vaccines are distributed and the world transitions back to normalcy.

Demo

Built With

• java
• python
• android-studio
• datastax-astra
• google-cloud
• google-places
• cassandra

hotspot's Issues

Not enough popular-times data

Fix python script to get more popular-times data from google maps. This will allow for better search results, prettier/fuller heatmap, and more

Introduce a way to see busyness at different days and hours

^ By expanding the main menu

Restaurant page always displays five-stars, five-people

As title

Make pretty

Fix headers, header titles, increase font sizes, etc.

Allow for toggling between live view and average view

User should be able to choose between seeing:

• current crowded levels
• average crowd levels at a certain time and day of the week