Hack the Beach 2017 Contest Sign-up
Sep 04, 2017
submission
#80
Submit your idea
Your idea/ technology/ company
| Name of your idea or project | PlayDate |
| Which challenge area does your idea respond to? | Building Community, Health |
| Describe your idea and how it can help Santa Monica | PlayDate makes it easier for people to play sports in their local public spaces. Sports are a great way to meet neighbors and make new connections... not to mention get an endorphin boost! A community that can exercise together will be healthier, happier, and closer! That was a high level overview. Optionally, here are some more details. The idea of PlayDate is to take the functionality that made online gaming so popular and apply it to physical sports. Two factors contributed to the rise of online gaming: information and availability. Information: PlayDate has seed information from the City of Santa Monica parks website. There are currently three sports in the application: basketball, soccer, and pingpong. People can visit the PlayDate website and get a map of local parks that offer facilities for sports they play. The data generated from PlayDate will help Santa Monica know which parks are underutilized and which parks are overutilized. Availability: PlayDate can create a profile and track the games users play, ranking them by skill. Using a ranked profile system, people can find an instant match with local players of a similar skill level. This saves time, money, and gas over travelling far for a planned-in-advance game. Playing different types of games, in different locations, will earn people badges to display on their profiles. For the competitive types, there will be a local leader-board so you could brag that you shoot the best hoops in the city. And if you are interested, here are some technical implementation details. PlayDate is built on a simple JavaScript frontend with a Django REST API backend. Ranking people uses the ELO rating system, an older but stable technology that has improved versions of higher complexity. Starting in a small location with only a few sports is perfect because it enables focus on core features. Newer sports will eventually be added and the locations can be crowdsourced, incentivized by badges. A major problem is telling whether a park is crowded or empty. Google maps already tracks this, but only by users who have phones on them. PlayDate could mimic this, but it is not realistic because not everyone brings their phones with them to play sports, and not everyone has PlayDate (yet). Luckily, machine learning can recognize the amount of people in a given camera view. With TensorFlow hooked into a camera feed, a real-time count of how crowded a park is can be pushed to the application. Additionally, that data could be stored to give a graph of the popularity of parks at certain periods in time. |
| What stage is your idea or project in? | Prototype / MVP built |
| What needs to happen to launch your product? Please list all resources (hardware, software, licensing, legal/regulatory, funding, partnership or support from the City, data, etc.) required to launch your program. | PlayDate is based on open source technology and public APIs. A limited beta version is ready to launch without any additional resources. An awesome version with more functionality would be aided with funding or additional software/design help. As adoption of the product scales, the server costs would exceed my personal budget. Funding can come from the community (publicity would benefit this), the city (as health is a public good), or company partnerships (private facilities who use the platform). Also, the application would benefit from usage data of parks in Santa Monica: data the city is currently trying to collect. If they can install cameras in strategic locations, I can build the software to gather that information, resulting in a win-win. |
| How realistic is it for your idea to be implemented by early 2018? Please describe what resources (if any) you will need in order to ensure a working product by early next year. | PlayDate does not use any groundbreaking technology, just a special combination of several different software modules that already exist. A working version is possible by next year. |
You and your team
| Team Name | patriick.com |
| List team members and their roles | --- |
| Contact email | --- |
| Phone number | --- |
| Primary Contact Name | --- |
Initial application scoring
Scoring
| Viability (40%) | --- |
| Value (40%) | --- |
| Growth (20%) | --- |
| Notes | --- |
| Advance to semi-finalist status? | Yes |