Longtail’s Chris Andrawes and Ben Derham win Perth leg of NASA 48-hour Hackathon

Over the weekend teams competed in the 48-hour long Perth leg of the international NASA Space Apps competition, which sees teams compete from over a hundred cities around the world.

Longtail’s Chris Andrawes and Ben Derham along with former-Longtailian Maurice Melchers took out the top prize for the Perth leg and will now go on to present their idea to NASA.

The brief required teams to “develop a digital product that leverages NASA imagery and climate data to illustrate the impacts of our changing Earth in areas of interest to you.”

Andrawes, Derham and Melchers’ solution was to come up with a way of expressing complex scientific data in a way that every human being on earth (across all cultures) could understand, including babies.

The breakthrough was the realisation that every human being can understand facial expressions, so the team worked on a way to convert NASA Data into Face Data.

The resulting website (currently a prototype ) displays the Earth’s overall feeling, based on complex readings from NASA instruments around the world.

The site also takes input from social media data and Google Trends data. Spotify integrations allow users to listen to playlists based on the mood of the Earth at any given time.

The team will begin the process of presenting their idea to NASA this week.