Home Screen
Barcode Scan Fresca under 0.5 Seconds
Fresca Carbon Footprint
Shopping Mode Feature
Aggregated Analysis

CarbonLens: AR Carbon Scanner for the Planet

Inspiration

Back in grade 3, I learned how many trees are cut down just to make paper. That sparked my curiosity about hidden environmental costs and carbon footprints. CarbonLens grew from that early question: what if we could see the real impact of every product we buy?

What it does

CarbonLens uses AR barcode scanning to instantly show a product’s carbon footprint, water usage, food miles, and packaging impact. It also has a shopping list feature that tracks the total environmental impact of your basket and suggests more sustainable alternatives, helping shoppers make informed decisions in real time.

How we built it

We built a web and mobile prototype using Zxing for barcode detection, combined with a multi-source data pipeline pulling from public databases and APIs. Gemini AI provides reliable environmental analysis, aggregating data quickly to deliver results in under a second. The system works seamlessly across platforms and scales efficiently.

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest challenge was integrating barcode scanning, since our team is fairly new to AR and real-time data processing. Next, we had to design a robust data pipeline to handle millions of barcodes. Finally, aggregating and delivering accurate environmental data within 2 seconds required optimizing multiple sources and building fallback mechanisms.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Sub-1 second scans for virtually any product
Reliable environmental impact results
A working AI-powered AR scanner for our first major project
A multi-platform solution that can scale

What we learned

We learned how to transform fragmented data into actionable insights, optimize real-time pipelines, and deliver instant, meaningful feedback to users. We also saw how making information visible can influence sustainable behavior.