Introduction
We have never had a better chance to make a greener world than now - and we are all in this together. The social isolation has improved the air quality globally and the Hiya! App makes this visible and fun! The aim of Hiya! is to engage people all around the world.
Hiya! will show the air quality at your location, how it has developed since last year and exchange it with anyone. NASA Open APIs by using landsat satellite imagery data is used in two pictures of your location, one of today and the other from a year ago. It aims to break the isolation and give everyone a context.
By making it visible and measurable we can in the future turn it in to a Hiya!-challenge. A game that not only calculates the air pollution and difference from last year, but also might challenge individuals, cities and even countries to compete with each other. This can be done as a short time challenge with measures today, with level of air pollution and changes over the last year. But it can also be done with a one year challenge a head. By saving the data it will also be easy to keep track of your local air quality over time. A leaderboard will display the top area results.
Anyone will be able to follow a challenge and keep up to date with changes. This might increase the community in local areas.
Philosophy
Hiya! is an easy way to get in touch with people you haven't even met. It breaks the isolation and gives a feeling of purpose, of being included. The improvement of air quality is something you do contribute with when in isolation. Hopefully Hiya! will make air quality a local and global reality. Visible, interactive and with easy access. Hiya! means Hi, with coordinate data, and its satellite images for two dates with one year apart.
Adding a game to the app aims to increases the fun and commitment. This commitment might remain even when isolation is lifted. Giving incentive to keep fighting for a good air quality. The app will present complicated data in an easy accessible way. This might therefore even be used for wider communication purposes, such as easy access for journalism.
Inspiration, approach to develop project, use of space agency data, tools. coding language, hardware, software
Hiya! connects isolated people around the world by showing them how the weather changed in their area with satellite photos. It works only for iOS devices right now. We have built the sample project on Xcode with Swift. Clients communicate with a sample Google Firebase Firestore Database to be created as a user. GPS permission is required to send Hiya! We store the received Hiya data (image urls, sender location info and date for the images taken) on this simple Database. Client communication is not instant when the app is running, the app needs to be killed and open again to see if there is any received Hiya!
Source of data and development of Hiya!
We have looked for NASA open APIs to see if we can get some images with location and date parameters. We have found NASA Landsat planet imagery endpoint to get images of specific location with latitude, longitude and date parameters. By getting satellite images we are able to show them in the app to users.
Also singed up for NASA APIs to generate an API_KEY for more requests with the endpoint. That API_KEY that we generated is stored in our database and clients are getting it with a request.
NASA open API
https://api.nasa.gov/planetary/earth/imagery?lon=100.75&lat=1.5&date=2014-02-01&api_key=DEMO_KEY
Problems and achievements
The problems that we have face is we do not guarantee that there will be image for the specified date and location. And the weather conditions for this year and last year can be totally different and which makes it hard to get some insights. However we aim to get a closer approach by setting this year date for a week ago and last year date to a week and a year ago. Our demo on the video that we have provided works great for Wuhan and Istanbul. It can be tested by cloning the project from github and building on iPhone devices.
The future
The weather might influence the results. We wish to develop the app with imaging, to remove e.g. clouds and other disturbances. Once the disturbances are removed, data available from NASA would need to be automatically calculated to receive a value of air pollution on each picture. If this is not applicable today it might be able to develop using a neural network. Adding weather conditions and timestamps of satellite images may get even better results. Though we are not sure if this would be available for every location.
The Hiya-pictures will be able to be saved and distributed. This will spread the awareness and give option for users to integrate on other platforms.
We wish to be able to make Hiya in to a game, a challenge. Individuals, cities and entire countries can compare their air quality. Both as of today, but also as time passes. A leaderboard with the best ranking will boost morals and fighting spirit. Everyone being able to follow any competition and receive pictures of updates on the way .
A page from NASA with information on air quality and social isolation will be included. This to advertise correct information on air quality and also support those in isolation.
Limitations
The areas will be limited to NASAs open API. As they don't cover the entire world some areas will not be applicable for this app.
All requested images might not be available for the chosen date. If an image is not available, an error will occur and users will be asked to choose a different date.