Plant Hunter

Plant Hunter splash screen
Find plants all across Hawaii by pin on Google Maps or by thumbnail image. You can also choose to take a photo of a plant from here
The botanist has the most categories to upload and shows points. Verified botanists can also award bonuses to players for rare plants
The Scientific-Citizen view showcases the user's side of the app, taking and uploading plants to the cloud.The user's points are shown above

Inspiration

State programs are understaffed and overworked, so we wanted to give back to Hawaii and help keep it beautiful and unique

What it does

Plant Hunter provides a gamified, crowd-sourced data gathering mobile platform for tracking plants in many diverse locations across Hawaii

How we built it

C#, Microsoft SQL, Xamarin, and Github

Challenges we ran into

While Xamarin provided cross-platform capability, it also required us to modify each feature for each OS, increasing testing time, and notifications took more time than we expected

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Notifications, video, amount of work that a small team can get done in a short time

What we learned

Video production is harder than it looks and not to get lost in the details

What's next for Plant Hunter

Sell out to Google! Really, though: Increase gamification by adding more dynamic scoring system, player level ups, bosses, and team play. Further down the road, add Machine Learning to assist with successfully identifying plants, improve on UI, experiment with augmented reality, monetization or advertisements, player education on plants they have found, and helping save plants in Hawaii.

Known bug: application crashes the first time after giving permission. Don't worry! It works every subsequent time.

Known bug: after giving application access to take pictures on first use, the user needs to take the picture again.