Realtime location tracker site

The fundraiser required that users could keep updated with John's live location and view his progress, allowing them to walk with him for sections along the way.

We designed unique logos and icons, a user-friendly interactive map and developed a custom solution to track John's live location on the WDGU website.

Challenges

One of the primary challenges for this project was the location tracking system.

We developed the project in two sections - One part was the public viewable website which included the tracking map of John's location, while the other was a custom web app developed for John's phone.

On the tracking map, we were also required to add locations of secret celebrities that John would meet with along the journey.

In a basic breakdown, this is how the whole thing worked:

• John opened the private web app on his phone.
• This would then pings John's real-time location to a server every 3 minutes.
• The location gets updated in a database along with a timestamp.
• A user viewing the tracking page could click the refresh button to manually update John's location on the map, otherwise it would auto-update every 10 minutes.
• In order to avoid a database overload, John's most recent location was cached on the edge with an expiry of 3 minutes, so that if any large traffic spikes occurred during the event, end-users would still have a lightning fast response time on the tracker map.

Results

John has now successfully completed the mammoth walk across the UK and there were no hiccups in the tracking solution we developed during the entire event.

As the event is now over, the page is no longer visible on the Weapons Down Gloves Up website, however they are always fundraising, so checkout their site to see what's currently going on.