Re:Leaf

Inspiration

In our modern fast-paced society, many find that they need to escape their screens and get out of their homes, but often find that they cannot find anything interesting to do. The parks and amenities near their homes can only remain interesting for so long. There are many who also wish to spend more time admiring Singapore's greenery while becoming more active, to escape the sedentary lifestyle but find themselves helpless to fight against procrastination

Enter: Re:Leaf

ReLeaf is an app we have envisioned to solve many of these problems at once through gamification.

The app provides a platform to encourage people to get out of their homes and pay more attention to the greenery around them. This would

Provide a pre-planned activity that takes the hassle out of deciding where to go so people can focus on relaxing
Opening people's eyes to the natural resource right by their doorstep helping them be more aware of the environment and its beauty, inspiring people to want to do more to conserve the environment
Expose more people to the idea that spending time appreciating the environment can be a relaxing way to de stress after work
Encourage teamwork and the kampong spirit by getting users to interact with one another to meet a common goal through quests and activities, and provides a common interest for users to interact with each other over

What it does

The app is basically Pokemon GO but with trees. Every tree is like an NPC (non playable character) with its own personality and fun facts/info taken from Smart Nation APIs and Datasets. Every single tree is mapped and people will have walk around, using their phone's GPS to look for trees on a map overlay. There is a point system with in game currency and people can rack them up through quests, visiting more trees, or even taking steps. Doing quests/activities with friends will boost the amount of currency earned. Currency can then be used to purchase cosmetic accessories for their in-game avatar and the point system will be used to create a leaderboard, thus providing various incentives for people to play the game more.

How we built it

Front-end: Android Studio/Java

Back-end: Firebase

API and datasets used: Npark's trees.sg and Heritage Trees

Challenges we ran into

Not all team members were familiar with Firebase or Android Studio and we decided very last minute to shift away from react native resulting in a lot of code and learning needing to be scrapped for this project

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that our application brings impact to the people in our vicinity. It encourages people to get out from their homes and enjoy the breathtaking vistas of our "City in a Garden". It also promotes our heritage trees and inculcates the importance of planting trees.

What we learned

We should try to reduce to burden of things to learn over future hackathons to focus more time on actually building the project and provide more flexibility in changing tools

What's next for ReLeaf?

more trees! lots of them - using a larger more complete dataset from trees.sg

Seeking corporate and government partnerships to use our in-game currency as part of new healthy living initiatives to let players exchange the in-game currency for real-life coupons and discounts. Corporate sponsors may be incentivised to work with us as this would add to the appearance of abiding to corporate social responsibility for their companies, as well as increasing foot-traffic to stores they may own close to significant landmarks in the game. For instance the location of certain notable trees might be close to them (think Macdonalds in Bishan Park, restaurants near East Coast Park etc)