TERRA

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Inspiration

"Sustainability is here to stay or we may not be"- Niall FitzGerald

The Global Pandemic of 2020 has made us realize the importance of what it means to "have a life" and also made us realize how our lifestyle makes our own survival on this planet difficult. The rising temperature due to global warming, air pollution due to carbon dioxide emission from transportation, or the death of marine creatures following ocean pollution caused by due deposition of plastic waste in ocean should make us question our responsibility as humans and raise a concern about the future of us along with planet earth. If advanced technology can enable us to look for a new home for humanity in space then it should also help us educate people about the damage their action causes and how can we fix it. After all, "To err is human" and to learn from it is superhuman!

As the upcoming shaper of the future and environmentally aware academics, it is our duty to spread environmental awareness and educate others about their responsibility towards the mother earth. Wth this motivation in mind, we came up with the project TERRA.

What it does

Terra, is an Augmented Reality (AR) mobile application concept which educates people about being environmentally conscious. We chose to utilize Instagram's reach of over 1 billion monthly users to realize our cause. We used Instagram's most used feature, "Stories", to deploy an AR filter which provides crucial information regarding current situation of global warming, air pollution, deforestation and plastic pollution. We linked a mobile application prototype which answers their curiosity by letting them know how they as an individual affect the environment and how they can help reduce these dreadful effects.

How we built it

We built the AR filter on the Spark AR Studio, a software that allows you to build AR filters for Instagam and Facebook Platform. The interactive mobile application prototype was designed on Figma, a vector graphic editor and prototyping tool. We did our research to find and derive insights from various data on climate change and its reasons. After gaining the insights, we made infographics to showcase the important information related to various causes of climate change and show it via an interactive 3D model.

Challenges we ran into

This was not only our first attempt to make an Instagram filter but also our first time building an Augmented Reality application. The Spark AR Studio was a new tool that we had to learn from scratch to bring our idea into reality. The research for finding various datasets and insights required us to go through a lot of resources and we verified all of these resources to be certain that we are using official and authentic data. While building our own illustrations, we made sure that they are compatible with the 3D models and the AR tool.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the fact that we were able to realize our vision of showcasing our cause and potentially educating people about being environmentally conscious. We also accomplished building a full-fledged AR filter with complex animations and interactions in the 3D environment which is ready-to-deploy on the Instagram app. Our prototype for the entire application is a good indicator of our entire vision.