Inspiration
A twist on Pokemon Go, Plantingo gamifies the act of going outside by introducing collectable “plant cards” and competitive point systems! People today are glued to their screens more than ever, but we choose to embrace this change by bringing nature to their screens, allowing them to engage with nature both physically and virtually.
What it does
Bringing nature straight to you! Through a quick camera scan, Plantingo’s plant classifier identifies the plant you point at, presents details about its origin and rarity, and then connects you with a chatbot that embodies the scanned plant. Our chatbot interacts with you in a playful and informative manner, encouraging you to ask questions, learn more about the plant's characteristics, and engage in conversations as if the plant were alive! Additionally, Plantingo incorporates fun social features such as a collection feature where you can keep track of all the plants you’ve scanned, as well as a leaderboard that fosters friendly competition amongst your friends to see who can identify and collect the most plants. Higher points are awarded to those that scan rarer plants, adding a sprinkle of fuel to the fireball of competition :D
How we built it
Our tech stack was Vite.js, Flask, and MongoDB. We used Google’s Gemini API to build our core functionalities, the interactive chatbot and plant classifier. Prompt testing with very strict parameters to make sure we get the desired outputs.
Challenges we ran into
- We were initially conflicted over whether to make Plantingo a web or mobile app, as well as which external tools we should use for our app. There were so many sponsorship tracks to choose from, so we weighed the pros and cons across them and eventually chose Gemini due to its powerful prompting system.
- Perfecting the prompts we used to feed into Gemini, because we needed exact outputs (assigning points to each plant based on rarity, making the plant chatbot interactive and only responsive to trivia questions).
- Minor difficulties, like having to parse objects returned from different APIs, connect to libraries that required different framework versions, and upload different image formats to the backend to scan.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
- Learning and utilizing an entirely new API we’ve never touched before
- Being able to identify a creative yet relevant solution to a real-world problem
- Building a functional full-stack app that also looks pretty :)
What we learned
Over the span of 36 hours, we acquired significant value by learning how to:
- Leverage Gemini’s API to build our core functionalities
- Prompt Engineer to generate very specific desired output with strict constraints
- Integrating backend with the frontend
- Work together despite being terribly sleep-deprived! And going into a hackathon purely for the vibes and the people without thinking too much about winning really helps you enjoy the experience much more!!
What's next for Plantingo
Moving forward, we're excited to explore partnerships with botanical gardens, environmental organizations, or educational institutions that could provide opportunities for collaboration and access to expert knowledge and resources, enriching the app's content and educational value. We also plan to expand on the gamification elements, by taking inspiration from Pokemon Go to make it more exciting and personal to collect plants. Overall, the goal is to continue evolving the app to delight and inspire users while fostering a deeper connection with nature in the digital age.
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