BiomeAR

An app that helps people understand the urgency of a need to change and gives them a way to do so.

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Inspiration

Most of us know about Global Warming and Climate Change but feel that its more of a problem for future whereas the effects can be seen now. Problems such as air pollution and ocean level rising are becoming more dangerous day by day and we need to understand the urgency of it. I was looking to find a way to present this urgency to the people which inspired me to create this app.

What it does

With this one of a kind game you can setup your Biome only to watch it die off after some time, maybe days or maybe week.

This game utilizes real world data for different environment factors(only air quality right now) in your location to affect your in game assets. So for example the trees that you are planting in the game may die soon if Air quality in your area is bad. The worse the Air quality the more harsh are the effects.

But that is not it, this part just tell you the problem. What now ?
We have a marketplace that lets you make a change in 3 ways :
1) You can buy a relief pack which will make your biome safe for a month (or more)
2) You can choose to volunteer in affiliated NGOs and they will give you a coupon code which you can redeem for in game coins
3) You can share the app with your friends and spread awareness for Climate Change

The coins that you collect in the game can not only be used towards the game. Maybe you don't really care about the game, so we have something more for you ! You can exchange these coins for goodies.

BUT THAT IS NOT IT EITHER!!!
We have a leader board that shows the top earners and spenders on our platform.
Whatever your reason may be, you can use this app to make a difference.

And if you are still wondering why there is a need for any of this , we have one more feature !! Awareness Hub. Using EchoAR and AR foundation we present molecules of some common pollutants floating around in Augmented Reality , by clicking on the spheres above them you can start a video which is directly streamed from echoAR. We can change these videos to latest information whenever required without any need to change the code due to the use of echoAR.

How We built it

I used firebase for authentication and registration. We used Vuforia sdk to create the AR and Biome experience in the game. For findings user's location I used ipstack api and for air quality index , weatherbit was used. We used echoAR and its metadata feature to build the awareness feature.

Challenges We ran into

This being my first solo hack presented a lot of issues, some technical ones being :
1) I had to do everything via script for echoAR as the models would instantiate in real time, floating effect especially took some time
2) For the game connecting health bar with AQI and giving player the ability to set up their biome took a lot of effort.
3) Unity messes up transform when prefabs are scaled down and instantiated and it took a lot of effort to fix it.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

This was my first solo hack and I completed it and made something unique which can be good for the world.

What We learned

I learned scripting for moving instantiated prefabs, floating effect and fixing scaling issues.

What's next for BiomeAR

In future I will be adding many more environmental conditions where your biome will be affected by weather , may drown with rising sea level etc.
For further incentives I will be adding animals that you can play with in your Biome.
This app can be huge in terms of bringing in volunteers for NGOs as well as for fund raising both of which have been adversely affected by this pandemic.
The future is to present this to corporations and NGOs which are working in this field because they can help with this app and we can scale it towards something that makes a huge impact.

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