Description of the Application:
HELSINKEY - Opening the doors of Helsinki to people
- What is HelsinKEY?
How often we find ourselves walking on a street, struggling to find a “place” close to us that could satisfy the need we have in that specific moment? We may just need a drugstore, a supermarket, a restaurant, a Bus Stop or a public Toilette – whatever.
The mission of HelsinKEY is to find that place and show it to you.
HelsinKEY has been built using the Tools and the Data (from Helsinki) available on Snap4City, and it is currently almost a Proof Of Concept.
It has indeed a simple and intuitive User Interface (a Snap4City Dashboard) optimized for mobiles, so that you can always bring it with you.
It currently supports “just” the search of Restaurants and Hotels, nevertheless, as shown in Section 3, its implementation (in NodeRED) has already the potential to integrate the support for the retrieval of any Service or Point of Interest (POI) around the user’s position.
It opens the doors of Helsinki, but it is not a key: it is HelsinKEY!
- Using HelsinKEY
- What does the HelsinKEY Dashboard allow me to do?
The HelsinKEY Dashboard allows you to:
- Locate your position on a map along with your address
- Locate the 3 Restaurants and/or Hotels which are closest to you, and show them on a map.
The Dashboard layout has been optimized for the screen of a mobile phone.
The dashboard exposes the following widgets, see Figure 1 on page 4:
- A map which shows your location and the location of the 3 closest Restaurants/Hotel (depending on the option you selected)
- A Wizard which tells you how to use the App, and returns your position address and the name of the closest Restaurants/Hotels
- The “Reset App” button to reset the Dashboard when it is opened (to clean up the dashboard from results coming from the previous session) and setup things to start a new search
- The buttons “Restaurants”, “Hotels” and “Restaurants and Hotels” to instruct the App what it should look for
- The Button “My Position” to retrieve your current position
- How to use the App
- Open the Dashboard
- Press the “Reset the App” button to initialize the App and display a map – see Figure 1
- The Wizard will tell you what Search Options are available
- Select one option among “Restaurants”, “Hotels” or “Restaurants and Hotels” – for example “Restaurants”, see Figure 2
- Click on the “My Position” button --> the map will show your position along with the position of the Hotel/Restaurant closest to you;
- You can also navigate/zoom the map and tap on the Marker of the located Services to have some info about them – see Figure 3
- To start a new Search/Localization you must press “Reset the App” first (see the section Known Limitations and Area of Improvement) and then go back to point 3)
We suggest to use HelsinKEY on a mobile rather than a PC, so that your position can be detected with enough accuracy. In case the position is not accurate enough an Error message is displayed.
Figure 1 - Screenshot of the Dashboard waiting of the User to perform a new Search