Project Proposal

[mingiryu]

Visionary, a visual dictionary

Contributors

• Mingi Ryu
• Faraz Heravi

App

We are building a visual dictionary where you could input any English word while getting back definitions, phonetics, and a gallery of images related to the definition of the word back. The main purpose of this app is to help English learners with their vocabulary with the help of visualization.

Subsystems

The app will contain 2 APIs, a dictionary API which provides the definitions, phonetics, synonyms, and etc, and an image search API which provides the related Images. The app will contain an editable text field to search for words. This search will redirect users to another activity with the word definition and a gallery recycler view containing the images. There will also be a loading screen and a single Image view in order to enlarge an image and display a prompt describing the image.

Challenges

Here is a few challenges that we will need to overcome:

• Handling two different APIs: Each API will contain a different GET schema which needs to be built
• Displaying an image gallery from the API: Displaying images in Android has proven to be a major challenge, especially when it's requested from the web in different sizes. We will need to do this in a recycler view.
• Handling non-existent words: The dictionary might not be up to date with very new English words, so we will need to find an external way to handle user requesting words that are not in the API.
• Use of fragments/activities: There will be a lot of redirection in our app compared to the homeworks done in class. Successful activity transitions become an important challenge of this project. An example of this is mapping images into text description. While the API provides a text description, we need to pass around this information from the gallery to the single image view.

Schedule

Week 1: Set up project, loading screen, search bar view Week 2: Set up dictionary API call and previewing definitions Week 3: Set up Image search API call and previewing images Week 4: Set up gallery recycler view and display images alongside definitions Week 5: Set up single image view with detailed components and prompt Week 6: Debug UI and components, thoroughly test the app, wrap up

List of APIs used

• Lexica, an image search API, https://lexica.art/docs
• Free Dictionary API, https://dictionaryapi.dev/

Material Specification

• API Request
• Gallery
• Recycler View
• Optimization
• Scrollable view, search view, single image view
• Intents and view models
• Activities/Fragments

Functional Specifications

• When the app is opened, the user will see a loading screen.
• User will then see a search bar. User can input any word into the field.
• If the word exists, user will see the definitions and phonetics of the word at the top, and the gallery of images at the bottom half of the screen. If the word does not exist, the images will still appear at the bottom, but the top of the screen will redirect user to external resources.
• User can click on any image to see another view containing an enlarged image with a prompt explaining the image.

Other apps and inspirations

Two apps come into mind for inspiration. One is StarryAi, an app that generates art from text description. A similar app, Dawn AI, is another app which generates art from words. We were able to find Lexica, which is an image search API but in art format. The design is inspired somewhat from any web search for images. With the help of the dictionary API we are able to turn this image feature into an English learner's tool.

[mingiryu]

Wireframe

[mingiryu]

Project completed and submitted