CrisisLens was inspired by two pivotal global trends:
- 🚨 The Evolving Social Media Landscape: The ongoing discussions around the TikTok ban and Meta’s shifting policies on censorship highlighted the importance of alternative platforms for open, user-driven content sharing. Peer-to-peer video streaming felt like the ideal solution to ensure transparency and authenticity.
- 🌿 Climate Change and Natural Disasters: The devastating wildfires in Los Angeles and the rising frequency of natural disasters due to climate change motivated us to build a tool that could empower communities with real-time crisis information.
We realized that decentralized video sharing could play a vital role in crisis information dissemination—putting the power of communication directly into the hands of people on the ground. 🌟
Creating CrisisLens offered us incredible insights across technology, design, and human-centered problem-solving:
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Decentralized Video Streaming: Leveraging Livepeer taught us how to handle real-time, peer-to-peer video streaming in a decentralized way, enabling seamless, scalable video sharing. 🎥🔗
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Designing for Mobile: Prioritizing a mobile-first design was critical. We ensured the platform was responsive and intuitive, acknowledging that users in high-stakes scenarios rely heavily on smartphones. 📱✨
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Human Behavior in High-Stakes Situations: Understanding user needs during crises was pivotal. We designed interfaces and workflows to reduce cognitive load, enabling quick and efficient access to life-saving information. 🌍🤝
Our tech stack was meticulously chosen to handle the challenges of real-time decentralized streaming, dynamic mapping, and content management:
- Vite: Development server for a fast, modern frontend build experience ⚡
- Node.js: Backend runtime environment to handle scalable server-side operations 🌐
- Livepeer: Decentralized video infrastructure for real-time peer-to-peer streaming 📹
- Mapbox: Map SDK to visualize crisis locations and regions dynamically on an interactive map 🗺️
- Google Firebase: Database to manage and store real-time user data efficiently 🔥
- TheNewsAPI: To retrieve and filter topic-specific news stories based on stream locations 📰
- Decentralized Video Streaming: Using Livepeer, we enabled seamless, peer-to-peer video sharing, allowing users to capture and upload events directly from their devices.
- Dynamic Zone Mapping: Implemented with Mapbox, this feature visualizes geolocated video uploads and overlays them with crisis zones in real-time.
- Topic-Specific News Integration: Leveraged TheNewsAPI to fetch relevant news articles dynamically based on user-submitted stream locations.
- Mobile-Optimized Design: Built using Vite and tailored to mobile devices for usability in high-stakes emergency scenarios.
- Real-Time Data Storage: Integrated Google Firebase to store video metadata, user interactions, and map coordinates.
- Leveraging Livepeer: Implementing decentralized video streaming required understanding how to optimize performance and reliability across diverse network conditions.
- Topic-Specific News Retrieval: Building an algorithm to pull relevant news based on stream locations presented challenges in filtering and ranking results efficiently.
- Zone Mapping Complexity: The convex hull algorithm used for mapping zones added computational challenges, especially in dynamically changing environments.
CrisisLens is just the beginning. We aim to further enhance the platform by:
- Integrating AI-driven content verification for reliable, real-time updates.
- Exploring partnerships with emergency services to improve disaster response.
- Enabling offline-first functionality for use in areas with limited connectivity.
With CrisisLens, we hope to redefine how communities connect, share, and respond in times of crisis. 🌟