Vera | Devpost

Inspiration

Every day, each of us walks past dozens of species of plants without giving them a second thought. Vera reconnects people with the natural world in their everyday lives by gamifying interactions and exposure to plants.

What it does

Vera is like Pokemon Go, but for plants. Users snap pictures of plants around them to add to their Dex and compete with friends to collect weekly and monthly regional challenge plants. Each populated Dex entry is tagged with information about the plant and the location that the user found it.

How we built it

We built Vera as a mobile app prototype in Figma and a functional back-end REST API using Python and Django. The Figma prototype contains user flows through the various screens, including collecting a plant that we took a picture of outside the CSE building! The Django server takes in an image and returns the plant's identification along with a host of information about it, utilizing a plant identification API powered by deep convolutional neural networks.

One consideration we made when building Vera were the balance between competition and a user's personal journey. We wanted the app to be accessible and inviting to all, but we also wanted to incentivize the most dedicated users to really explore their areas to collect hard-to-find plants. To balance these interests, we devised the tiered challenge system, where the common tier is easy to collect without going out of your way, and the rare monthly plants require some research into their habitats and exploration to find them.

Another consideration was to avoid inadvertently causing environmental harm by encouraging users to find endangered plants, which would degrade their habitats. To avoid this, we decided that all the challenge plants would be checked against a USDA database to ensure that they don't have any federal or state protected status (for other countries than the U.S., we would have to find a similar resource).

Challenges we ran into

It took us a while to get started on the project, as none of us had any experience with Figma previously. We also ran into challenges searching for APIs and data sources about plant information, and when we found them, the documentation was lacking so we had to reverse engineer how to use their endpoints.

What we learned

None of the team members had any prior Figma experience, so we learned a ton about designing and prototyping throughout this project.

What's next for Vera

Our next steps are to convert the Figma prototype into a downloadable mobile app. We also want to incorporate more robust and varied data sources to get a complete list of regional plants to use for the challenge.