Inspiration
As soon as the snacks rolled out, I noticed a sea of wrappers all around me. While I admit, I was the cause for some of them, I started thinking about how much pollution is actually accumulated outside this venue. It led me to explore a solution for the project, but it was not something that could be done just by one person. Being accountable for the trash and casual littering is the responsibility of everyone, regardless if they did or not. That's why I create envolv, a cool app that actually embraces this task and essentially gamefys this whole process.
What it does
It uses Gemini's Multimodal and VLM-like capabilities to take care of one major task-determining if an area was actually cleared of trash or not. Once that was successfully implemented, users were free to find areas that needed trash to be cleared, take a before and after pic, and earn credits in the app. These credits are the key to making the whole process fun and sought-after. Inside the app is an embedded game, one thats purposefully addicting. The only thing is, you NEED these credits if you want to play. The more you play, the more credits you use, and the more trash is disposed of correctly. Alongside this, I wanted to provide users with useful metrics for their own understanding of the impact they had. These metrics would give them data about the kind of stuff they were disposing, how much they were helping, and what their friends were up to. This, alongside cool visuals and a sleek modern design across the entire app made it an awesome solution to the problem.
How I built it
It's an app for iOS, so Swift was the only language used in development. The entire app was built with Swift, however, for the image uploading feature, I leveraged Gemini's API with the Swift SDK. Additionally, XCode was used for creating development builds and test software on my iPhone.
Challenges I ran into
A lot of my challenges stemmed from the fact that iOS apps use Swift, and I didn't know Swift. Additionally, XCode's navigation and uses could be more esoteric. I also struggled restricting myself with those caffeine chocolates.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
I'm really happy and proud to have pulled through the challenges above, but more importantly the friends that I was able to make even though I was on a solo-team.
What I learned
I learned that staying calm while debugging saves an immense amount of effort and frustration and as a bonus-caffeine is a joke.
What's next for envolv
The very next step is to put it into production, as it is already polished enough to be a consumer app. The way that I designed it is so that there is room to add new features super easily. I'd love to implement more games to play for spending credits, hopefully reaching a wider audience and accumulating a status comparable to Linkedin games.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.