Solar Navigator

Inspiration

We came across a neat visualisation of a space elevator and what lies at each elevation on earth. Perhaps something similar could be done horizontally along the solar system.

What it does

Scroll across the solar system and chat to its residents to teach facts to children.

How we built it

We built the scrolling logic from scratch using a html canvas and javascript, and interfaced with google gemini to create a chatbot for the residents of each planet. Each was given its own prompt to produce unique personalities. The backend that serves the webpage and makes calls to the API was built in a simple one page Flask appplication.

Challenges we ran into

Building the scrolling logic from scratch in HTML proved to be quite challenging. Perhaps using a graphical framework such as Three.js would have helped. Prompt engineering for the language model in order to consistently get desired outputs.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Each resident has its own personality and can confidently answer questions about its home planet, and successfully using the google Gemini API was an interesting challenge. The sticky scrolling animations turned out very well and were satisfying to use. All the artwork for the planets, aliens and GUI was drawn by hand and added a personal flair to our project.

What we learned

Technical debt can kill projects when taken lightly. It is important to plan for the future and make your apps scalable. For example, using well documented andsupported frameworks that are pre tested in place of coding from scratch.