It’s hard for us to connect with outer space given very few will ever go there, but what about the views of our cities and oceans from orbit? Yorbit, a web app created during NASA’s Space Apps Challenge in April, lets you search locations, customize the images with text and simple designs, then share through social media.
For its efforts, the Kansas City team—from a pool of 8,000 participants around the world—won the Most Inspiring award, one of only five global awards handed out. It’s all part of an effort to build solutions related to NASA’s missions, education and exploration efforts. The KC team included members from Ingenology, Salva O’Renick, Datasense, EyeVerify, Waddell & Reed, Sporting Innovations and more.
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Yorbit was developed for the Earth As Art Challenge, based on a book of remarkable satellite images of our planet. One of the book’s creators, Lawrence Friedl, director of NASA’s applied sciences program, was in town to kick off the event.
“We needed to make a story out of it,” said Ben Suh of the Yorbit team. “You want to have somebody care. You want to bring a reason and emotional value and we did that by allowing someone to personalize and customize each map with a simple design editor.”
The Nero Project also was a finalist, for Galactic Impact. One of the team members, Coty Beasley, said they will continue working on it. It’s also the second year in a row with KC winning a global award. In 2013, Sol won for Best Use of Data as the world’s first interplanetary weather app.
