Touch Grass was built over 8 days. Shout-out to Rikki, Chilli, Qasim and Guy - the Northcoders that I worked with. It was challenging yet fun - we learnt a lot.
Agile working practices were followed, using Trello for our Kanban and Github for version control.
Touch Grass is a React Native app developed on Android. It uses a custom Expo build to integrate Viro for augmented reality and Google maps to drop trophies. The backend is serverless using Firebase authentication and realtime database.
We use an AR trophy which is collected using the phone camera when the user is within 100 meters of it's location. On sign-up the user provides a postcode, the Geoapify API then provides places of interest within a 5km radius. These are stored within firebase and 3 locations are randomly chosen for trophies. Google maps displays the 3 current collectable trophies as grass tufts and the users realtime location as a green smiley. The user scores 100 points for each trophy collection. After the three trophies have been collected three new ones are placed on the map.
We plan to move backend functionality into Google cloud functions to secure sensitive data (API keys etc). However, we focused on getting an MVP on it's feet so we have yet to implement this. Unfortunately, this means we can't offer a working demo of the app as that would expose sensitive information. But take a look at the video to see it in action - please note that for this demo proximity was turned off to demonstrate collecting a trophy. In real use the user location needs to be within 100 meters to access the camera and collect the trophy. Feel free to check out the code on Github.
This is a work in progress with a long way to go before completion but I enjoyed exploring new technology, working practices and am proud we completed our MVP.