Quiet Friends

Inspiration

We were wandering around in the city, trying to find ideas for the best hackathon in the world, when suddenly, a marvellous vision of the God of trees (Géant Vert) appeared to us, shining at the centre of an aura of bright light. He was very sad, as all the pedestrians were completely ignoring his multiple incarnations around the city. We cheered him up with some fertilizer and promised we would try to help. "Quiet Friends" was born.

We are participating in the Axa challenge for LauzHack2020 ;)

What it does

"Quiet Friends" is a web-app designed to educate people, in an entertaining way, about the trees that are everywhere, but usually ignored, in their city. It is played like a simple video-game, in which your character is supposed to walk around the city (or, in the prototype version we show, a park) to find out about the types of trees that are there.

How we built it

We first took pictures of trees in the parc of Mon-Repos in Lausanne, and we also collected the corresponding GPS coordinates. From here, we built a simple website containing a P5.js app enabling to visit the park, in which we placed the trees to the proper coordinates along with their picture.

Challenges we ran into

None of us was really used to code in Javascript or to do web-development. None of us knew anything about trees.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We managed to have a very simple prototype, which works and demonstrate that our app could actually be of interest to the city if properly implemented, with a better gameplay and visual design.

What we learned

We learnt to master P5.js on the fly. We learnt that many different types of try were cohabitating in a simple park like Mon-Repos.

What's next for Quiet Friends

In addition to improving the visual design of the app, we would like to take the concept further and automatically map the trees from satellite images. Also, we would like to offer the possibility to the users to take pictures of trees in the places they visit to next embed them in the app. In addition, enriching the encyclopedic aspect of the app could be interesting. For instance, for each tree that is discovered, providing a brief description of its species, along with the current dimensions of the tree could be of interest to many people curious of the nature that surrounds them.