Exotic Matter

Exotic Matter| The Isolation Solution

Awards & Nominations

Exotic Matter has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!

Global Finalist

The Isolation Solution

Social distancing policies enacted the world over during the COVID-19 pandemic have left many people socially isolated. Your challenge is to develop innovative solutions to combat social isolation.

Summary

Exotic Matter is an app that tackles the problem of people's boredom and counterproductive behavior during the COVID-19 lock down. Users can share unique experiences such as cooking a rare dish or suggesting an underrated film, and best posts are added to user's schedules, which can be followed by them to diversify their day. On occasional days, we publish a collection of posts with articles from NASA, ESA, and other space agencies, so that users can experience everyday activities of astronauts.

How We Addressed This Challenge

Coronavirus changed our lives in an instant and influenced our daily routine. We stopped going to work, to school, taking a walk, and forced people to isolate socially. People were not prepared for such changes, and now the coronavirus poses a danger not only to the physical but also to the mental component of each of us. At the same time, some people are ready; these are astronauts. NASA astronauts have been flying to space for more than 50 years. For nearly 20 years, crew members have been staying in the area for months-long missions living on the International Space Station with only a few other people in about as much space as a six-bedroom house. Astronauts experience various aspects of social isolation and confinement during their missions.

We wanted to combine the knowledge and experience of astronauts as well as people who wants to share how they diversify their life with unique activities, that might be new to a lot of people. Together, this collaboration of experiences can potentially escape people from being stuck at completing the same actions over and over again during the isolation.

Our project suggests a list, or how we like to refer to it, schedules that present community voted activities for the users of our app. Schedules are formed at the end of each day and all repetitions are eliminated. This way, each of our users can find out new cuisines, productivity techniques, skills to acquire or a new workout strategies, to find what works best for them.

For a lot of us, life in isolation started to feel like "Groundhog day" movie. We want to change that.

How We Developed This Project

We had several ideas that could address the issue of isolation. But like many people at home, we struggled with escaping the boredom and remaining productive throughout the pandemic, so decision was made to make a software solution that could be actually used by a large amount of people, namely a mobile app.

Our team is familiar with Flutter, framework made by Google, that is used for creation of beautiful and performant apps. This framework is based on dart, which is a relatively new language, but very similar to any of the modern script languages.

Zhangir was working on functionality of the app as well as backend, while Erzhan was doing the UI and frontend. Zhanibek was in charge for collecting the data and making UI mocks that were later used in the release.

For our backend, we were using the Firebase, Google's Service that combines database (Firestore), functions execution environment (Cloud Functions and Cloud Task Scheduler) and storage (Firebase Storage). To create Cloud Functions we used TypeScript.

We used space agency data to demonstrate the everyday activities of astronauts and how they approach different aspects of our lives.

The biggest achievement of our team is the fact that we ultimately created a social network from scratch that specializes on enhancement of quality and enjoyment of everyday routine for potentially millions of people. We faced a few minor problems down the road, but we remained calm and thoughtful to make sure that users get the best possible experience when using our app.