Carbon0

An Augmented Reality app to combat Climate Change
B2C / Android App / Web / Product / Visual

Overview

Climate change is HERE. Last year, the wildfire season in Northern California happened earlier and lasted longer than normal. The fires in Australia killed or displaced nearly 3 billion animals. Not to mention the freeze in Texas, it led to 2.7 million people losing electricity and 12 million people experienced water quality issues.

This has led Yeled, the founder of Carbon0, to formulate the idea of saving the earth in a fun and engaging way. What if the 800 million people that played Pokémon would play a game designed to reduce their carbon footprint and economically empower environmentally-friendly businesses? It is a game that gives players instant feedback on their actions using computer vision and augmented reality.
GOALS
  • Build connections and communities that help to reduce the carbon footprint via various daily human activities
  • Change human behaviors through gamification
  • Empower environmentally-friendly businesses and charities
ROLE
Product & Visual Designer

TEAM
Work directly with the Developer and the MakeSchool student engineers, the Business Strategist and the Data Scientist

DURATION
Oct 2019 - Present

Discovery & Initial Iteration

The game was first designed to be a location-based game for tree planting. We researched that 3 types of trees are common in San Francisco. The game encouraged players to go out to plant these trees, water them, by showing the augmented reality representation of trees. We won the Best Design Award in the Science Hack Day.

Second Iteration

After a few Hackathons, we redesigned the game to focus on 5 areas that players can achieve by asking about their habits. The 5 areas include Diet, Transport, Utilities, Energy, and Recycling. Then players can choose the pledge they would like to work on and awarded by an augmented reality filter. They can take a picture and share it on social media.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.team.carbonzero&hl=gsw&gl=US
This iteration won the first prize at Climathon. Our team received money reward from Square. In addition, we were selected by Google's Pilot Program. We built a beta app and launched it on the Google Play Store in December 2019. We secured 30 test users and asked them 6 questions on the User Experience. Further iteration was made according to their feedback.

Third Iteration

We were selected as the top ten finalists in Paris' Change Now Summit to compete in the Global Climathon at the Grand Palais in January 2020. We made some connections in Europe. The students of the Montpellier University would be our test users in a pilot program. However, Covid hit and this project was on hold.

Due to the global lockdown, our location-based concept did not work anymore. Our team pivoted and shifted the focus to build a website version, so non-Andriod users and people outside of the United States can try our application. Meanwhile, we worked hard on telling how lockdown helps to reduce carbon emissions on social media, aiming to connect to our potential users by using the right SEO.

To find engineers to help us build the website, our team presented our story to the Make school. A group of 4 engineer students joined us. For 3 months, we had a weekly Design Sprint Meet-up to discuss what features to be built, how, and the timeline of completion.

I worked on the wireframes of both website and mobile versions, as well as the introductory video on the landing page.


To start the game, players need to answer the 5 questions and their replies would determine the score on the Carbon calculator. After completion of the quiz, players can choose one mission out of the 3 missions suggested to them. Once the mission is done, players can take a picture of the AR Zeron and share it with friends on social media. The goal is to lower the carbon score every week.

Future

We are building a new machine learning feature on the website. When players go to "My garden", they can take a picture of their plants, the machine learning model would tell them whether the plants are healthy or not by comparing to the information in the database.
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