SKYWALL

Our project is solving the My Sky Color challenge, in line with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, an entity made up of scientists, engineers and technologists that build spacecraft, instruments and new technology to study Earth, the sun, our solar system and the universe.

We’re addressing both the shortage of consistent sky color recording to measure air pollution and the lack of incentive for people to actually take pictures of the sky. With the concepts of augmented reality and gamification, we seek to increase the amount of images collected of the sky by gamifying the process and giving users an interactive “sky wall” to write on and digitally manipulate in real-time.

The Skywall team is working to create a mobile app prototype that lets people write a message in the sky that can then be viewed by others near by. Users of the app would in fact be helping the My Sky Color challenge by recording sky colors and having fun sharing messages with friends on an interactive sky wall at the same time.

The mobile app sends captured sky images to a web platform where these images are then curated and can be compared to levels of aerosol from AERONET (Aerosol Robotic Network) or similar air quality monitors.

By gamifying the act of collecting daytime sky images, the Skywall project allows for a higher volume of consistent and qualitative standard sky color data for scientific and third-party app use.

PROJECT SCOPE

Our primary focus is to address the data-gathering issue. Any tool created to address the shortage of consistent sky color recording will fall short if no one is taking pictures. We solve this problem so scientists can have a larger amount of images for specific locations.

Multiple projects have been elaborated to solve the My Sky Color challenge and can be used in concert with the Skywall project. Our minimum viable product gives a simple application programming interface for the scientific world to benefit of ground-based sky color images.

To discriminate between useful and useless images, we have a machine-learning and gamification strategy that will help this process. This strategy could be implemented with additional time and funds. We also have a simple strategy to calibrate all the different camera sensors in order to even color differences.

Project Information

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