Energy Fluent

App Design (Page 1)
App Design (Page 2)
App Design (Page 3)
App Design (Page 4)
echoAR
Unity

Inspiration

Scientists say that there are only 10 years left until the effects of climate change are irreversible. The state of our planet deteriorates day by day, and only now are people starting to take more action. Through research, we found that household appliances are what make up the majority of the energy consumption from your home. If people took into account this information and reduced the amount they used certain appliances, and were aware of the energy each appliance in their home consumed, they could take action for the betterment of the planet and themselves by reducing costs and fossil fuels used. Through Energy Fluent we hope to reduce your home's energy consumption through an app and visual experience, helping everyone make an impact on our planet.

What it does

Energy Fluent displays statistics about household appliances and notifies the user when an appliance or utility is using up energy for much too long, or if it’s using up energy even when it is being unused and turned off. This app also incorporates AR to help display their energy statistics for the user to look over. Energy fluent is made up of three main components. Its base is a user-friendly app to connect your home appliances and track their energy usage. It then gives you suggestions and alerts you to ways you can reduce your home’s energy consumption. Lastly, energy fluent provides you with an interactive graphic AR/VR platform to help you visualize your impact and make changes to reduce your overall energy consumption.

The app keeps track of how much energy each appliance uses and the amount of time an appliance/utility has been running. Using this information, the app lets you know potential solutions for conserving energy. If the project were to be released as an app, it would also connect to smart sensors and devices in the home to track energy directly and gather data to use. If one appliance or utility has been running too long, the app notifies you to turn it off or check out the problem. The app also notifies users of “vampire appliances” that are turned off and are still using energy. Using AR, the app uses the data from the program to clearly display the user’s information about energy usage, so the user can see for themselves how they can conserve energy and learn more about their daily habits. Everyday, the app drops a daily tip letting the user know something that can help them contribute to improving our environment or assign a small, simple task that the user can complete to help conserve energy or help the environment in general. Additionally, everyone has a different use for each of their appliances and utilities at home, so the default limitations on the app may not match the user’s preferences. By going into settings, users can personalize the limits to match their schedules better.

How we built it

As a prototype, we built an AR application with Unity and echoAR. We used echoAR to host our 3D objects in the cloud and used Unity to display them together. We used the metadata stored in our objects from echoAR to display energy usage stats in real-time on Unity. We also created an app layout to show what the completed app would look like as we did not have the time or expertise to complete an app along with our Unity application.

Challenges we ran into

As first time users of Unity and echoAR we struggled a lot to get started and create the end product that we did. It took us a lot more time and work than we expected, but we learned a lot. We often ran into bugs that we didn't know how to solve and took a lot of time to debug due to our lack of experience. Working online was also a huge challenge, as we didn't have much support and had trouble communicating through video call.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We did our best to create a prototype with the platforms and coding language (C#) we'd never used before, and are proud of what we created. We're really happy with how our presentation and idea turned out in the end, and although we have a lot to work on, we know where we want to go next with Energy Fluent.

What we learned

We learned a lot about using the software we used, Unity and echoAR, and the language we used, C#, and hope to use them more in the future. We also learned a lot about project planning and time management, and about ideation and making an idea come to life. We also learned a ton about working as a team online as well, and enjoyed the entire process, although it was stressful toward the end.

What's next for Energy Fluent

In the future, there is so much more we can try out and explore using Energy Fluent. We had a lot of trouble working with Unity and implementing the program, so the biggest thing we can do is work on implementing the program and actually building an app that can one day be released to the public for use. With all of our resources, the possibilities for the future are endless. We can implement AI in the program so the app can find better energy conservation solutions. We can also open up the platform so that users can connect with their community and see how they stand against people nearby.