Want to help further the study of air pollution? Yep, there's an app for that...

Photo by Graur Codrin

Android phone users can now help further the study of air pollution with only the click of a button. Created by computer scientists at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, "Visibility" allows users to contribute their own real-time snapshot of the air around them. Simply download the app, take a unobstructed photo of the sky and send it in. Each picture is then tagged with location, orientation, and time data and transferred to a backend server.

According to the L.A. Times' technology blog:

The USC team has devised an algorithm that uses the phone's location and the direction it was pointing to determine how bright the sun should be in your image. It then looks at your photo to see how much that theoretical sunlight has been obscured, and from that calculates how much gunk is in the air (it doesn't work yet on highly cloudy days).

For those Apple users (like me!) who feel left out of the loop - the researchers say an iPhone app is in the works.

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