We wanted to contribute to a cleaner environment and after researching the user pain points and values, we found that we are solving the problem, that nature lovers feel extremly frustrated, when they see litter around the walking pathways around city parks. Then we asked the question, how to motivate them, to pick up the litter, or at least release the frustration in a constructive, fun way.
- We researched military recruitment to apply the same process to our trash fighter recruits, later to become agents fighting for nature.
- We tested the Rasa open source chat bots and how thew work.
- We imageined that we could make something similar to Monkey Islands' pirate sword duel.
- And then we changed everything.
… appying for funds from EU Regional Fund, Slovenian Ministry for Culture and Centre for Creativity put a form to the raw idea. The application process helped us to consolidate the idea, twist it, organize, plan and prepare to execute the plan!
The first draft was that the user would have to argue with a chat bot that had the personality of the type of person that litters. We tought that it would be fun … but then we realized, to argue is to waste energy. Better take on the attitude of Bugs Bunny and do a number on them!
So we had to twist the idea! We wanted to do something more simple, as we had to more importantly already solve the Computer Vision Issue of recognizing, that users actually picked up the trash and wanted to find a simple incentive system to make that as enyojable activity as possible. Our mission was to:
1 Solve the Computer Vision application to verify that the user picked up the trash.
2 Reward the user so that the experience would be as pleasant and enyojable as possible.
3 Survive the workload when the project starts and plan the development process.
Once we prepared the documentation for the application, made the financial plan, did the research, anticipated the steps needed to make it a reality, shot and edited the pitch video, we sent it and waited.
We got the happy results in October 2020 and we were eager to start working on our project. We had to choose a mentor and luckily I went to a highscool full of cool kids, and one of them was also my mentor in this project, Tine Lugarič, co-owner of Trampolin. We were able to pink-pong my ideas and helped me stear in the right direction.
The real work started and we were more or less occupied for the one year duration of the execution of the project. Preparing a website, socials, doing Computer Vision research on three major cloud providers (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform), recording sounds, animation and programing was the biggest project idea we took on until now, and we are gretefull for the opportunity to do so. We learend a lot and grew the same.
