looksapp

Will your location be threatened by a meteor shower in the next twenty minutes? Don't worry! Look App will warn you in time to find out a safe shelter. Do you want to be updated on the visibility of the ISS in your city? Look App will send you a notification in time to take a glance at the sky and say goodbye to the astronauts.

The Weekend

During the 48 hours of the Space Apps Challenge we have built an iOS Application that shows the user a selection of space events and sky phenomena through a smart user interface. Half of the work was to gather, analyse and combine data manually from these scientific databases:

• Astronomers Telegram - Generic

• NASA GCN - Gamma Ray Bursts

• Simbad - Generic

• IAU - Supernovae

• PoyntSource - Asteroids

• Heavens Above - ISS, Visible objects

• Eclipse - Planets

• Staralt - Supernovae

We determined then a data model common with every type of event that we wanted to operate with and inserted data into a local database.

The other half of the work was spent, of course, developing the iOS Application. “Look App” searches the database for events and show the last 50-100, providing exhaustive details such as: name, type, description, observation time and conditions, weather, source URL and observatory.
Most importantly, everything on LookApp can be shared with your colleagues or friends on social networks such as Facebook or Twitter.
It also schedules notifications for the future events, alerting users as soon as the event data is available.

The Future

We’d like to continue this project and give it to users. For this purpose we cannot miss these very important milestones in the next months:

• Integration: Develop a back-end for the application that fetches and aggregates data automatically from scientific databases used during the weekend. It will integrate a notification server too, taking care sending real time alerts to smartphones and tablets.

• Information: The system will refine datasets producing information with the best balance between scientific accuracy and accessibility.

• Interaction: Smartphones are powerful tools in terms of user interaction. We plan to combine user GPS position and time zone with events data. For example, our app would send a notification only if an event is visible by the naked eye, based on the user's location at that time.

• Increase: Look App is now working on both iPhone and iPad. We would like to make it available for Android and Windows phone too, in order to reach the largest amount of users.

• Visit our Website for further updates!

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