Result Time - hiTec Competition
I have not been active on the blog for quite some time. The reasons being the heavy course load and the work that I have been involved in. Two of the projects that I was working on for quite some time got over last week. One of them, hITEC had the final presentations last Friday. We were a team of 5 people from different departments at UCI and we worked over the last 3 months on this project. The details follow:
Video On The Wall
The project revolved around the idea of Citizen reporting. The new thing in our case was the clever use of technology that we used and the ease of use and no cost of involvement on user’s part. The main features of the project can be described as:
- Reporters(anyone can be one!) stream videos(yes live!) from their mobile phones. (We used android as our mobile client but it is not limited to that in any way!)
- The web client, that can be accessed through the browser, shows the videos that are currently being streamed and also provides access to the archived videos.
- Use of mobile platform features like the location determination to show relevant content.
- Instant feedback from the browser to the mobile phone thus creating an experience of interactive media.
- Lucrative revenue model and sharing of revenue with Reporters.
Technology-wise, The project involved development of mobile client on Android (Java), Server in Ruby on Rails and Flash for Video streaming and interactive experience.
Below are some of the screenshots of the web client. (Mobile client simply streams videos with a few other simple screens thus nothing much to show there…)
UPDATE: The announcement of the competition results can found here.
Home page:
Noteworthy: Location based browsing, Selective Content view
User Blog Page:
Noteworthy: Recent Videos, comments on the video etc (Mostly like youtube but comments go to the user in realtime)
Post Search:
Noteworthy: Search Navigation on through Maps and a textual list below the map with detailed view.
A lot of work is left in many areas but the judges were impressed with what we had to show and we eventually did win the competition. The official announcements happen on June 13th.
Finally, As I said I was working on two projects, I have a few things to write about the other project too. I think I’ll talk about the second one tomorrow…
Tags: android, Google, mobile streaming, sandbox, videos, youtube
