NatureTV

Nature livestreams to calm you

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Inspiration 🧠

We asked ourselves, "what is one thing that is universally calming?" Nature comes to mind, and it makes sense. In fact, even Harvard Health Publishing writes that "ecotherapy has shown a strong connection between time spent in nature and reduced stress, anxiety, and depression." While it is not clear why nature affects us this way, it works, and that's what matters.

What it does ❓📺🌿🍂

Our project is a website that plays nature/animal video livestreams on an antique TV. The birds chirping, the wind and other sounds help calm you, while you look at cute animals that have the same effect. Even if you are stuck at home and unable to go outdoors, you can easily switch on NatureTV and watch/listen for hours, even while working/studying on the side.

Additionally, to support animals, we also have embedded a link to donate to the WWF (World Wildlife Fund) so that they get some more support in their mission to that saves endangered animals and promotes wildlife conservation.

As an added bonus to our fellow developers and dark-mode enthusiasts, we also have a dark mode available for our website. 😎

How we built it 🔧

We initially tried to build our project in C# using the .NET Framework to create a web application, however, we later switched to HTML, Javascript and CSS because we accidentally deleted our project.

Challenges we ran into 🧨🏃‍♂️

  1. Accidentally deleting our project ❌

We've attended a lot of Hackathons in the past but never made a mistake as bad as this time. We accidentally deleted our project through an error with git. This was one day's work completely lost which was extremely disheartening. Nonetheless, we still carried on and got a project that was still interesting and showcased our idea well.

  1. Poor decisions ⏱

Originally, we tried to make a 3D Zen Garden in Unity. Then, we tried to make a Meditation App. Next, we tried to make NatureTV, but after deleting our project, we once again tried to make a 3D Zen Garden, before switching back to NatureTV again. This confusion as to what project we should make lasted much longer than it should have and that led to us having a very limited amount of time. Despite that, we still made a project that worked in the end.

Accomplishments that we're proud of 🏆🏫

  1. Still having something to show despite our lack of time and accidental deletion ➕

  2. Learning about grids and additional formatting tools in CSS 🧠

  3. Making the design of our website very friendly, and making it scalable to all screen sizes 🎨

What's next for NatureTV ❓📻➕

We also soon want to add a "NatureRadio" which would feature several "stations" that you could listen to hear live nature audio streams which would be very calming to listen to while working on something/studying. Additionally, we would like to have other streams such as the one by the Tidmarsh Project (MIT) incorporated as other channels on NatureTV.

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