Hackanon - Space Apps Challenge

Hackanon| Sustaining Our Planet for Future Generations

Awards & Nominations

Hackanon has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!

Local Peoples' Choice Winner

Sustaining Our Planet for Future Generations

There is concern worldwide that environmental issues we face today will have an impact on future generations. Your challenge is to create a way to communicate the importance of environmental responsibility to people of all ages.

EnviroMapAR | You Save, We Pay

Summary

In 2020, the environment has become a major factor in shortening Earth’s lifespan. We need to bring awareness to our community through crowd-informing and crowdsourcing. Using NASA’s data and resources, we have created a solution that will bring awareness to users, using local geospatial data. Finally, to make something fun for users, there will be an AR companion that will guide you through your journey with EnviroMapAR. Together, we can save the Earth!

How We Addressed This Challenge

In 2020, the environment is a huge problem that people should be aware of, but only a few that are actually aware of issues going on around the world. Us, humans, should unite and fight the problem together. It has been reporting the sea level is rising each year with about 0.1 inch. And it has been reported 11 700 years ago, during the interglacial period, sea level was 5 - 7 meters higher than today, but was dropped 120 meters. Today, our sea level is rising again with 70 meters above average recorded in 1900, and is still rising every year. Global warming is also a big problem, the combined land and ocean temperature has increased at an average rate of 0.07°C each year, and some factors that go towards this is the start of the industrial age. Factories, invention of engines, all contribute to global warming.

Global warming is directly impacted by air quality, which is a problem often found in urban cities. Air quality is getting worse and is becoming another critical global issue that needs to be done to patch this vulnerability. One of the largest contributors to poor air quality as gasoline vehicles and awareness must be provided. There is something that needs to be done so that everyone in our community can do and contribute. We address this challenge by coming up with a solution that is suitable for everyone in the community. If everyone contributes a little, crowdsourcing in the end would make a great impact.

How We Developed This Project

Our mobile app solution, EnviroMapAR, unites people together, of different ages. It’s a fun engaging app that encourages users to travel around their city to contribute positively to their local environment. We use pollution data to calculate how much mileage a household should drive monthly to maintain a low carbon footprint and lower global warming, while correlating a heatmap of gasoline usage. Our app can also scan for nearby electric vehicles when travelling which gives you extra points. Our algorithm is able to calculate the local carbon-footprint based on the area where a user has completed their environmentally friendly task/event. Taking the user’s exceeded driving mileage as a negative contribution (CO2 commission). But, we also keep track of the user’s positive contribution, such as their completed tasks. The algorithm gives the user a carbon-footprint score, which represents how environmentally conscious the user is. Together, we combine every user’s carbon-footprint score, and create another score for that area. Earning points by performing tasks in the community are not the only way users can earn points. When a user notices something needs to be fixed in their area, posting environmental issues by taking a photo, or video and uploading it to the application, they are eligible to earn points when the task is verified by one of the community members in the area. Therefore, users in the same community can help complete the task to earn points for themselves. The points each user earns can be used to donate to worthy environmental causes or redeem for gift-cards while collecting more AR characters that will speak and thank for their contribution. The AR character will be using the data to compare with before and after. Some example journeys will prompt the user to walk to their daily destination, which they would normally drive to, such as their workplace or school. In the end, we will analyze the data and see how much change the user has contributed. Another example of a journey, would be clearing the sidewalk of garbage. Our mobile app is built with the Flutter framework with the Dart language. Our backend where user's data (Credentials), behind the scene calculation is done using Google Firebase. Firebase Firestore is used to store the user's relevant data on their contribution, such as their mileage, journey. Firebase Machine Learning for predicting a suitable mileage for the user based on their location.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

Our solution idea was inspired by children's mobile games, we noticed every child is engaged in mobile games, we took this advantage to educate them, and make the children create an impact on their community. Another inspiration is the Sweatcoin app, controlling one’s mileage by walking gives them points. Which inspired us to use the same idea as the Sweatcoin app. We want to enhance, and build-on with the Sweatcoin app’s idea, that it could also be used to contribute to our world.

Our app is getting the data from by making requests using the NASA API, we first request the user’s location when the user first installs the app, and then analyze their location’s coordinates by making a request to the NASA API, using the response data. We are able to analyze the data and use it for prediction. The calculation will be based on the user’s location, household members, and smartly calculate how much they should drive, in a heavily polluted location. We encourage them to walk, or get an electric hybrid vehicle, and in less polluted areas, we encourage our users to drive greenly. Every time the user completes a journey in their city, the AR character will inform how much he or she has contributed, and then in a long term, the polluted percentage will decrease with a great outcome in the community.

We are designed to protect the user’s data. In order for our app to function properly, we need to request the user’s geolocation data. When we sell our data to the government; every user's information will be protected and will not be transferred to different other organizations and companies.

Project Demo

Fund and Revenue

Our solution would require fund to continue the support of our app, One method is by users paying to unlock premium AR characters and ad revenue, we’ve seen games that do watch add in-game points, we want to use the same technique, if for some reason the user is unable to complete their tasks locally on their journey, they can still earn by watching an ad, which also gives us revenue. In order to get large amount of users, we would need a plan to work and collaborate with the government, the government pays startup companies, and because our app’s goal is to bring a good cause to the community; we are sure the government will fund our app solution. The fund will contribute to the data scraping and extend using the API to much larger locations count, therefore we want people all around the globe to participate in what they can do to save our planet environmentally. Part of the fund will also be used into the development of our app, and create websites, social media accounts, posters, infographics to even bring more awareness using other techniques and sources of Earth’s environment’s issues.

YouTube Demo Video

UI Pictures and Infographic Posters