The problem LiveMysuru solves

The goal of the Mysuru Track for Code off Duty was to develop a web-app or mobile application to attract more tourists and help the tourism industry come back from the setback that occurred due to the SARSCov-19 Pandemic.

We came up with the idea of LiveMysuru. People love traveling, taking selfies, and winning. Our app, developed using the Google technologies Flutter, Google Cloud, and Firebase leverages exactly these three things to promote tourism in a way that is not only profitable for the Mysuru tourism industry, but also a rewarding experience for the travelers.

The in-app map shows the user some of the famous tourist spots spread across the royal city of Mysuru. The travelers can visit those places, then click a selfie there. With the help of geolocation APIs, our app will confirm that the selfie was indeed clicked at one of the marked destinations. Once confirmed, the user will be given some points. The more places the user visits, the more points they can rack up. Sharing those selfies with the hashtags #LiveMysuru #MysuruTravels will fetch them more points.

The user can then redeem these points at the partner hotels and stores across the city of Mysuru for discount coupons, gift cards, and other rewards while they enjoy their stay in the city.

Therefore, not only will tourism be promoted, the users will get rewarded for traveling (that too in a fun way!), and the local businesses will get a boost too.

Challenges we ran into

Some of the challenges that we faced while building this project were:

1. Collaboration: Two people working on the same project can get a bit confusing and tough for the team members to efficiently contribute to building a solution. To overcome this, we extensively used Github's version control and collaboration.

2. Communication gap: It's easier sitting together and building a solution rather than sitting a thousand kilometers away from your team member. To overcome this, we used Google Meets. The state of the art compression algorithm of Meets used low bandwidth with high-quality audio and video communication.

3. Backend integration: Being from the AI-ML domain, both my team member and I didn't have a whole lot of experience with app development. Integrating Firebase and Google APIs into our project turned out to be a major challenge. Countless development hours were put into going through documentation and tutorials.