As the coronavirus emergency situation had kept us all in our home offices for several months, gradually everyone started to get bored and wanted a chance to get out of the room. To keep the spirit of the Uptime team fresh, we decided to get people out of the house following the 2+2 rule and sent them to explore Tallinn at the weekend. We created an orienteering application which guided users to the coordinates of various checkpoints at exciting places in both Tallinn’s city center and the Old Town.
Each of the following points opened three new points, so that the participants could choose for themselves which way to go and in which order to take the next signs.
The total length of the most direct road was about 22 km. As the weather was very volatile this weekend, it was not easy to follow the trail, but good orienteers decided to do it by hiking or cycling.
There were those who followed the trail by bike for 3-4 hours, and also walked for seven hours, of which several hours were after dark.
While playing the game, it became clear that Tallinn is very versatile and worth discovering!
Orienteering application completed during an emergency period
At the same time, our Full-Stack developer also had a nice challenge and created the orienteering application herself.
The application used in the game was developed by Uptime specifically for this orienteering, and was a kind of hybrid between the traditional MVC and the SPA. Its “frame” for user creation and login was done as an ASP.NET Core MVC application. On the front page of the MVC application, in turn, lived a small Vue application, which showed a map with points, a list of points already found, and allowed the QR code to be read and registered directly inside the application.
When opening the link, the point was registered in the name of the user currently logged in and the user was shown a map with points. Secondly, it was possible to open the phone’s camera directly from within the application and take a picture of the QR code. The camera returned the captured image to the application, where a link was read from the QR code in the image, the point identifier was separated from it and the visit was registered.
