Brainstorming the Next Phase

We've taken a bit of a break from working on the HEEP widgets for a little while and decided to focus our time on creative ideas for the next round of design. Kevin and I had a few brainstorming sessions over Spring break to come up with ideas that would benefit the users of the HEEP website, the people of HEEP and the students who will be using the larger aspect of the project my team is working on The UH Dorm Energy Competition.

The Dorm Energy Android Application
The idea here is to make the competitors visually see how their dorm and floor is doing compared to other dorms and floors.
Let's put this into a story/scenario:
Sally grabs her Android phone and presses the UH Dorm icon on her home screen.
She sees a layout that displays many floors of a particular dorm. She swipes the screen to change which dorm that she wants more information about. When she gets to the dorm she wants to view, she sees numbers 1-6 on a building representing the floors. She wants to find out how her friend Mark is doing on the 4th floor of Freer (a Dorm at UH). She taps the number 6 on a vertical structure that represents a building. A pretty layout with live energy consumption and a simple one week graph is displayed.

The idea here is to not push too much information on the students and allow an alternative mobile vector for the competition. We believe a simple mobile application has that potential.

A Visual Javascript Application to Display Household Energy Data
This idea is still under the works. So far our idea is to create an application that can visually demonstrate a graphical depiction of Honolulu energy usage based on household data. There are many possibilities with this and we intend to explore them when the data becomes available. Currently we are looking forward to seeing what kind of infrastructure we can obtain to house the 1TB+ of data on a SQL server that obtains fresh data nightly. I predict the model will be based on OLAP and contain highly detailed information in the form of a Google Map overlay. More to come on this exciting project.