You And Eye - Space Apps Challenge

You And Eye| Home Planet at Your Fingertips

Home Planet at Your Fingertips

Develop a user-friendly application or tool to discover, visualize, and analyze NASA Earth data for monitoring our home planet.

You and Eye: Realise, Reflect, Repair

Summary

For this project, we have designed a mobile application interface that would potentially become a part of our daily lives. The main objective of the application is that it can be user friendly to the target users of the general public who have an interest in receiving news on the environment around us such as earthquakes. The NASA application can help analyze datasets and present news information in an interactive manner to the users of the application. Our product can have an option for the selection of a specific geographical area or natural event, which helps people to focus on a specific region of their own preference.

How We Addressed This Challenge

Introduction

The current challenge of this project is to design an application which allows users to discover and potentially visualize NASA Earth datasets that can help users monitor our home planet and improve their daily lives. We developed an application which reshapes the boring and hard-to-interpret data into interactive, lively news stories. Over the years scientists have come up with an overwhelming amount of research and data on the negative effects of climate change. In fact, so much data that the severity of climate change has been normalized. Climate change is no small problem and it surely cannot be alleviated without the work of the general public, and that is precisely the problem we aim to tackle. With our mobile application, You and Eye, we compress all the important data NASA has to offer and make it accessible at your fingertips. Our team firmly believes that the best way to efficiently make use of the vast amount of data is to add in a human touch; to tell a story interpreting the cold, meaningless numbers that the charts and graphs show.

Functions

Our app would collect simple data of the user such as occupation and residence area through a survey for big data analysis. From this we could derive potentially useful data and automatically suggest categories to the user for them to follow.

Recommendations

We would use machine learning to train a predictor to predict the possible interested categories to users based on their occupations, location and age. When user register in the app, it generates the possible interested categories, giving recommendations to user.

For you

The “For you” section of the mobile application is based around a customized series of news events tailored to the selected preference of the user, which is relevant to their location with events that have taken place concerning their region specifically. When the user clicks the event, it will jump directly onto the data analysis page with the data and explanation provided for the event.

Global

The “Global” section aims to provide news and updates on other international regions, where users can browse through updates that took place in other countries and cities.

Monitoring

If the user finds a particular category to be of interest, our Monitoring function would be of use. Apart from purely raising awareness on climate change, our team is willing to take it one step further to help our users combat global warming. The function allows users to select a category and have regular notifications pushed to their mobile phones whenever changes are made to their selected event, allowing them to constantly monitor the environment around them and take the actions they deem appropriate to help save the environment.

Multilingual Support

Last but not least, we would of course provide multilingual support for our application so that it could be used by everyone around the world. The general public from around the globe would then be able to empathise with the data we have on hand and be motivated to take action.

How We Developed This Project

Inspiration

In recent times, the world has experienced many natural disasters and events such as earthquakes. The method of which important events such as natural disasters are communicated to the general public is through online news websites and also applications such as BBC. We took a method of encompassing technical features such as notifications and UI/UX design of the application to extend better features offered to the potential users of the product. Our approach is to attempt to motivate the general public to take action on tackling climate change globally by illustrating how the occurrence of natural disasters is affected by climate change with datasets provided by NASA.

Our Approach

In our project, we reused the NASA data, making it more user-friendly and meaningful to normal people with no scientific background. By adding more visualization(images, time series, etc.), we made the existing data easier to understand and explained the data. Our project is an app, which broadens the use of NASA data and maximizes the societal benefits.

Used Technologies

So far, we have developed the prototype of our app using Adobe XD. Since we have a limited time to propose our solution to this challenge, we had to work more on high-level implementation. However, we also thought about the feasibility of our project.

We will use the React Native framework, which uses the most widely used programming language in the world (Javascript) and the world’s largest package manager (NPM). Our team consists of 6 people (4 people with programming skills & 2 people with business background). While two of our members will be working on the ideas and documentation, other people will work on the development of the app using the software development environment (Visual Studio Code). We also going to adopt the usage Github to maintain our code synchronized.

Problems and Achievements

During the period of the hackathon, our team has experienced both problems and achievements. One of the main difficulties of our team was that members did not know each other before this event. In the beginning, we felt uncomfortable. Another problem that we faced was misunderstandings. Some members of our team misunderstood the challenge and worked on totally different things. Luckily, we were able to detect it early and made sure that everyone goes in the right direction. Mainly, our achievements during the hackathon were learning from mistakes and solving the problems that we faced. We believe that participation and experience that we obtained is already the biggest achievement for us.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

Our app is built on the existing information on earthdata.nasa.gov/ website. We took the information from six main categories, which are “Atmosphere”, “Calibrated Radiance & Solar Radiance”, “Cryosphere”, “Human Dimensions”, “Land” and “Ocean”. When the user clicks to one of the categories, he will be directed to the organized and clear information page. The user can obtain the data according to his interest. We added more visualizations such as graphs, images, time series in our app, so it will be easier to understand for the general public. Graphs will be built based on the existing past data obtained from the NASA website using the Plotly Javascript Open Source Graphing Library.

We also made use of NASA Open API at api.nasa.gov/. Particularly, we used NASA’s Image and Video Library by API calls to retrieve the images and videos. We used them in our app to improve the visualization. Our app retrieves the data and generates the visualization (maps, bars, etc.) by calling other NASA APIs.

We utilized the GIBS API for accessing near-real-time imagery. Our app will call GIBS API to get the imagery layer of the planet worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov/. According to what the user has chosen, our app will call particular APIs related to it like Carbon Dioxide, Temperature, and others.