Month: February 2015

Press release #1: New Social Platform Unveiled by Pass It On! Group

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BLACKSBURG, VA, February 13th, 2015 -­ Pass It On! of Blacksburg, VA is an online marketplace that uses an unconventional form of currency, favors. It will provide a digital platform where users can confidently help others and be sure that their time was not wasted. A small fledgling company, it is driven forward by the energy and creativity by its young development team. All members of the development team are confident young individuals with experience in user experience and software development.

Pass It On! Group is comprised of a small team of four: Minahm Kim, CEO and project manager. Alex Ciccone, marketing coordinator and software engineer. Matthew Chittum, Lead UI developer. and Joshua White, lead UX designer.

The mission of Pass It On! is to provide a friendly and safe environment where people can showcase their abilities and be able to help their neighbors with an assurance that their efforts do not go unnoticed and unrecognized. We hope to bring back a sense of comradery among communities.

Our team is in the process of market research and competitive analysis to determine the viability of our product, as well as how to establish our position into the market. This is an important step to producing a successful product as it allows us to see what it will take to establish ourselves within the market. In the upcoming weeks we will continue to develop our concept and begin selecting our framework and software to begin prototyping.

If you would like to keep up to date with our progress or have any questions please send an e­mail to Alex Ciccone at acicconne@vt.edu.

“This is a revolutionary idea that has never been explored before. It’s a project that I’m very excited to be a part of and I am looking forward to sharing our work with everyone.” ­-Matthew Chittum

“The Pass It On! system will change the way we interact with and give back to with our community by encouraging people to help others. The world needs a system like Pass It On!” ­-Alex Ciccone

“I am excited to be working with this team to bring a fantastic idea into reality. It is a unique idea that can really change how things work once it gains traction. Keep an eye out for us!” ­-Minahm Kim

Press release #1: A Storm of Clouds

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Blacksburg, VA., Feb 13, 2015 ­ In the Human­-Computer Interaction Capstone class, students formed teams based on project interests. Matt, Tyler, and Romico will be working on a “Photo Clouds” project this semester.

Visualize a day during summertime. Clear skies, a cool summer breeze, and a bright sun overlay outside. Ten minutes later, the atmosphere changes dramatically. Clouds suddenly fill the sky into an overcast. That’s when everyone knows that a storm is coming. Rain falls on the ground and it brings up newness and life. Matt, Tyler, and Romico are these clouds forming together. Their plan is to bring something new to the field.

Matt Bock pitched this idea to the class. “This idea came up when I my extended family came over one time. I realized that many photos were being taken through smartphones. Then, family members would ask to send them certain photos and I noticed that process took a while,” said Matt. “The basic idea is to set up a cloud during an event and have all photos taken during the event to be stored in that cloud.”

We noticed during a scouting assessment that this idea isn’t new. Applications already exist with most of the features that we desired. It was discouraging but only for a few minutes. Our next idea is to find ways to bring a new concept to the idea. Questions to ask would be, “What are those applications lacking? Is there a new creative idea that us 3 can figure out?”

The Photo Clouds Team is a team of three senior level computer science students at Virginia Tech: Matthew Bock, Romico Macatula, and Tyler Haines. All three of them have extensive skill sets in computer science after their years of study. With several semesters of experience in the field of human­computer interaction at their disposal, the team is dedicated to creating the best experience possible for their users through rigorous testing and design iteration.

Project idea: Proximity chat

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Advocate: Michael Peter

Project description: An application allowing users near each other to form chat groups based around currently occurring events and activities. When creating a chat, a topic is selected (e.g. “VT v. UVA Football Game”), a GPS pin is dropped on a map to represent the center of the chat, and a radius is chosen within which other users are allowed to join. The idea is to create a platform for meaningful discussion with the people around us, and allow users to share their opinions with all those who are in attendance at the event. This idea could go in a number of directions, and serve a number of purposes. Crowds would be able to weigh in on the quality of calls at sporting events, students in classrooms could gauge their understanding of the material in comparison to the class as a whole, coworkers could easily announce that there are donuts in the break room. The use cases are broad, and the design will be narrowed down according to the interests of the development group. I think this will be a blast to work on, and allow us to fully utilize our common HCI skills while picking up some new stuff along the way.

Project idea: Gaming social network

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Advocate: Iyaz Shaikh

Project description: Gaming Social Network is a social networking app designed to allow gamers to get in touch with other local gamers who play the same games. The app would find local players who play the same games as the user and allow them to friend request them. If they choose to accept the friend request, you will be given their in-game ID for that game so that you can get in touch with them and play games with them. The end goal here is that you can find a group of friends who live nearby you with similar gaming hobbies as yourself.

Project idea: Pass it on!

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Advocate: Minahm Kim

Project description: Have you ever done a favor for a friend and they told you that they owe you one? Have you ever cashed in that IOU? Most likely not. Perhaps because there was nothing that they could do for you. What if there was a way to take that IOU and cash it in with someone else who can actually help you.

Pass it on! is an online community similar to craigslist, but rather than buying or selling services with money, the act of doing a favor for someone else earns that person a number of points at a cost to the person receiving the favor. For the scope of this project, I would like to see Pass it on! built as a web app, with a mobile version if possible.

Minimum features for the final deliverable include but are not limited to

  • User Profile
    • Current Points
    • Reviews
    • Favor History
  • Wanting Favor
  • Offering Favor
  • Database
    • Users
    • Favors

Desired/Potential Features

  • Filtering by category
  • Filtering by region
  • Bidding System

Project idea: Safe roommate finder

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Advocate: Christopher Wood
Project description: As most of you already know from my pitch Wednesday, the project idea is for a roommate finding application that allows users in the same domain, or similar, to find suitable roommates to live with. The selling point of the application is to make it a safe place to search by possibly requiring social media linking and verification to make sure each match is legitimate and traceable. An API would be built for the software that would allow 3rd party developers to integrate the software to their sites which I imagine would be used on property manager websites and the like. I could also see the use of creating free to use forms and layouts that other sites can directly use with next to no effort. I believe this would work best as a website, and due to the API would be easy to extend to mobile apps. One of the benefits I see with this project is that most students in Blacksburg area potential beta testers so as long as the effort is put in to market it, getting the feedback we need should be fairly easy. Also, if it works as an idea, it’s marketable to virtually any University/School and should scale very well regardless of user base.
Skills: Web Development, User Design Experience, App development & possibly marketing experience

Project idea: Photo Clouds

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Advocate: Matthew Bock
Project description: Photo clouds is a system to allow people to easily share their pictures with many people quickly and easily. It does this by allowing users to create small, temporary clouds and inviting other people to upload their pictures to that cloud. The initial goal of the system is to alleviate the need for people to try to share large amounts of pictures (like from a day out or an event that they all attended) using slow, clunky means like MMS messaging or Email. All the photos would be in one place, and allow for people to browse, pick, and choose which photos they would like to keep without having to ask the owner of each picture to send it manually.

Expanding on this idea of a specialized cloud, we can also use this system to create a kind of collaborative photo album. For example, imagine a big event like a wedding or a family reunion. One person can start up a new photo cloud at the beginning of the day and open it up for everyone attending the event. As the day goes on, people can post pictures to the album from their phones as they take them, perhaps adding captions or comments. The end result is a huge collection of pictures taken by many people throughout the whole event, capturing the event in a way that one dedicated photographer could not.

And that’s that! I’m really excited about this idea, and I hope other people will be too!

Project idea: Architects of Anarchy, medieval PvP mobile game

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Advocate: Joe Wileman
Project description: Architects of Anarchy (AoA) is a player vs player mobile game centered around an 8-bit medieval design. Inspired by Gauntlet, AoA lets two heroes do battle in the mighty dungeon arena. Each hero has offensive, defensive, and utility abilities that can be activated on an 8×8 grid. The two heroes are on either side of the grid and can use as many abilities as their “mana pool” allows. Currently, the hero classes consist of the warrior, ranger, and mage. Some additional features include the player’s ability to customize their hero’s name, appearance, and title. The social aspect of this project includes allowing players to play against each other when in close proximity. Players in a region will also be placed in a faction, and factions will fight weekly to determine who advances in the ongoing war that is Architects of Anarchy.
I’ve included two screenshot designs to show how the game will feel and interact with the player.
ArchitectsOfAnarchy[2]
ArchitectsOfAnarchy[home2]

Project idea: Minefield game

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Advocates: Scott Fraser and AJ Fritsch
Project description: This is a 1 vs 1 turn based strategy game. You and your opponent have to navigate through a field of obstacles and the objective is to be the first one to reach the opponents “home base”. The map is basically just a giant grid.  We want to have the terrain randomly generated for the map at the start of each game. For example there will be some spots that are impassable by the players, such as a lake, this will help each game play differently and force you to use different approaches with your strategies. At the start of the game you have a limited number of mines to put down on your side of the map (your opponent cannot see where you have placed the mines). The mines are meant to guard to your side from the opposing player’s units that are trying to reach your base. Every turn the player will have a certain amount of points to spend on actions (i.e spawning new units, moving units, placing more mines, defusing enemy mines, etc). We plan to implement different types of units that can play different roles, and hope to have enough units where players will have the option to choose what units to play that game with and not have to continue using the same units over and over. Hopefully this allows players to try out many different strategies with their different types of units. Some ideas for different units we had were:
1) mine placer – places mines that are hidden from the opponents view
2) mine defuser – defuses a mine laid by an enemy
3) remote detonator – this unit places a mine that will not explode when it is stepped on, instead it is detonated remotely when the player chooses. Explosion can trigger nearby mines for larger blast radius.
4) unit that has no other function than to run to the enemy base. Has higher movements per turn than the other units.
We have a few more units in mind that we haven’t finished out the details for yet.
We believe we could complete this project with 3 people, but would be happy to have more if more are interested in the idea. We are both very open to ideas anyone might have, as well as being open to the platform this will be on. We both have experience in web applications and mobile apps, so we could do either.

Project idea: Rediscovering forgotten places with crowdsourcing

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Project sponsor:
Adrienne Serra
VT University Libraries Special Collections

Project description: The Special Collections in the VT University Libraries are home to thousands of rare books, diaries, letters, and other documents, some of them hundreds of years old. The writers of these old documents often refer to locations — towns, buildings, roads, houses — using names that may be entirely forgotten nowadays. Towns are replaced by cities, streets are renamed or changed, houses are torn town, etc. For example, the northern part of downtown Blacksburg was an African American community known as New Town for much of the first half of the 20th century. The location of New Town is known today, but many other locations are forgotten or hard to figure out. In other examples, like street names in Syria, changes can occur rapidly even in modern times. If we could discover where these old places were located, we could place them on modern maps and connect them to their modern names, creating an important missing link to the past. Often times the answers lie in piecing together clues from documents scattered around the web, in digitized museum collections, web pages of historical societies, old news articles, etc.

For this project, we will create a social platform to help crowdsource the locations of old place names, allowing any interested member of the public to contribute. Readers browsing the documents could identify confusing or unknown places that are presented to the crowd as challenges to solve. As a starting point, we may focus on a set of 19th century diaries held in the Special Collections which refer to many places, some modern and others obscure. This project has the potential to enable important historical discoveries, help people learn more about the places where they live, and change the way we interact with information online.

Project deliverables: A social platform that supports crowdsourcing of the modern-day locations of old place names.

Skills: Web development, social computing, mapping, visualization, history, digital libraries/archives