Our project name, rebearth, is a play on the words rebirth, and Earth, with the slogan "Giving news a new life".
We were inspired to pursue rebearth by the recent news events that have been published through different social media outlets. Due to the recent events such as Coronavirus, Australia’s wildfire, the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, and more, we have taken account that the media can be very biased and/or exaggerated. To tackle this problem, we have created a website re-bearth.space. We’ve decided to make use of the Google News API, which can be biased as Google only displays news trending within the reader’s area/country. So instead, we decided to gather different news sources from their original country, and we thought this would give the reader different perspectives depending on the country the user has entered. The aim for rebearth is to give the audience a chance at reading news from the origin country, rather than reading a foreign view from an outsider's perspective.
We developed our program using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JSON and WebGL. For programming our back-end, we used JavaScript and JSON as they were used to implement the API’s to our website, whereas HTML, CSS and WebGL were mainly focused on User-Experience and Human-Technology Interaction. We used WebGL to model and animate the globe, where the user can interact with it by zooming in/out, and have a 360° view of the planet. Although there was a learning curve with WebGL and JSON, our team proudly achieved the goals for our finished project, through teamwork and determination.
The next step for rebearth is to make the globe more interactive by adding different markers in different countries, which will allow all the news outlet will be displayed on the side panel, instead of making the user type the country’s name when clicked on.
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