GeoNodes

Team Name

Team Chronos

Team Members

Project Description

GeoNodes is the unification of IoT, Augmented Reality (AR) and Machine Learning with the popular gaming aspects of GeoCaching and Ingress.

GeoNodes is a citizen science AR game for mobile devices, paired with physical data collection nodes that, together, are designed to help further the gathering of scientific data, imagery, and environmental changes. The GeoNode unit is a small IoT device that users can register to receive via mail, in conjunction with government agencies (such as CSIRO) and private science corporations. These devices are equipped with environmental monitoring capabilities, solar charging and can utilise Telstra'a LPWAN IoT technology for network connectivity to a centralised reporting platform. The desired location of the nodes are identified by the agency and are marked on the GeoNodes map. The physical placement of the unit is crowd sourced and completed by citizen scientists and those interested in the initiative/game. It is anticipated that these would be secured mostly to trees, but could also be placed on poles.

The physical installation of a node is one major part of the gathering of data, but is also used to initiate the real game aspect. GeoNoders who install the unit are tasked with taking a full 360 sphere panoramic stitched photo with their mobile phone. This is registered against the node and awards a user points as part of the game. All participants in the app can see the pinned locations for all nodes and are rewarded by going to one and completing the a 360 sphere photo. In this way, it is expected that a stream of updated images of the location can be used to provide a time-lapse of changes and can be analysed for scientific data. The game encourages the 'capture' of nodes to gain points and progress.

From bushfires and other natural disasters to climate change and fauna decline, GeoNodes is an exciting way to get every individual involved and contributing to data collection, while keeping the effort exciting and interesting. The physical node devices may also act as warning devices for disasters that impact areas and could present as an early warning and remediation opportunity.

The app offers:
• Gamified points system that rewards effort and achievements based on activities completed and nodes captured.
○ It's not in the scope of this event, but it would be suggested that prizes, such as swag, are awarded.
• Leaderboards for your local area and wider areas.
• Corporate challenges and GeoNodes public events.
• Node mapping and viewing of images.
• Augmented reality view of previous images when at a node, so you can view any of the older photo spheres to see what a location used to be like, while panning your phone around.
• A log and guestbook of all previous node capturers.
• Statistics and graphs of environmental monitoring for the area.
• Open data published for all GeoNodes.
• Using Nodes as an image anchor, it is possible to utilise Machine Vision and Image Analytics to analyse the changes in each successive image.

Geo Caching: https://geocaching.com.au/
Ingress: https://www.ingress.com/

Data Story

The first challenge and information I investigated was the Telstra LPWAN. This is something I'm already familiar with, but wanted to find a solution that this enabled now that would never have been previously possible.

Following this, I looked into the bushfire, environmental, and science citizen challenges. Looking through the available datasets around environmental monitoring, air quality, flora and fauna data, landcover and tree studies, it became obvious that more resources were needed in this area. There are just so many gaps in locations, data and imagery. I plotted these data points utilising PowerBI to identify that many rural locations and points of interest simply aren't covered.