Inspiration
Our team consists of students who, in their spare time, love to play games. Since games are so close to our hearts, we decided that a program to help the environment should be one that motivates users to compete against each other and award points with real rewards, just like how a game would work. That's how we had the idea to turn plastic recycling efforts into that kind of game. We wanted a way to encourage students to recycle as often as possible by turning it into both a competition as well as an incentive system in which users can tangibly benefit from recycling.
What it does
PlasticQuest allows users to upload images of themselves throwing away trash. Depending on the size of the trash, and whether or not a trash can is in view, the user is awarded points that they can then use to redeem real-life rewards, like Georgetown merch and other swag.
How we built it
We built the application using NextJS. We also incorporated Gemini API for image evaluation and Firebase for storing user information and supporting google oauthentication. We then deployed our app to vercel and added our custom .tech domain to it.
Challenges we ran into
We had a lot of trouble setting up the codebase, as it was all of our first times building an app using NextJS from scratch. The hardest part was probably setting up the .tech domain and connecting it to vercel, as it was also our first time trying to connect an external custom domain to a vercel deployment. But after an hour or so of youtube videos and playing around with the DNS and record settings, we got it working. You can now visit our website by navigating to www.plastiquest.tech
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're proud of not running into any Github conflicts and issues, learning our lesson from a previous hackathon and ensuring our tree looked as clean as possible. We're also proud that we were able to get all of our features implemented in time as well as learning several necessary frameworks and technologies, including NextJS, Vercel deployment, using .tech domains, using Crypto API for image hashing, etc.
What we learned
While looking for ways to prevent duplicate image from being submitted, I discovered SSH256 image hashing. I found it really cool each image can be turned into a global hash and how that can be used to prevent image duplication.
What's next for PlasticQuest
Upon recieving funding, we would be able to actually purchase rewards and ship them to users. We're also hoping to be able to work with plastic recycling companies to turn our excess plastic into funding for even better prizes. Maybe in the future, every college might have their own PlasticQuest system, ensuring that every campus across the world remains as clean as possible.
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