There's a lot to love about New Zealand. For a dimunitive state it punches well above its weight in politics and human rights. The Kiwis were the first country to grant women's suffrage, recognise indigenous ownership of the land, and they fearlessly told Uncle Sam and his nuclear fleet to bugger off. They're savvy inventers too; the hairpin, the eggbeater, and bungee jumping all sprung from the mind of creative Kiwis. And if this website can be believed a New Zealander also invented jogging - amazing!

More recently, a bunch of young New Zealanders - all surfers - have invented a smartphone application that turns the device into a real-time wave buoy. Sebastien Boulay and his canny colleagues at MetOcean New Zealand have begun developing the app that they hope will be used by sailors and boaters to provide a network of real-time swell updates. Sebastien recently spoke to Swellnet about the invention.

Swellnet: A smartphone wave buoy app: Which one of you had the lightbulb moment?
It was originally talked about in a group meeting that flowed onto developing such a wave buoy app. It really came randomly as a realization that all of our phones on the table had accelerometers...

It's easy to see how the app would work on, say, an Indonesian boat trip, as you could record the arrival of each new swell. Has it been tested this way?
During part of the development phase it was tested on a boat, and this is part of the idea behind the wave buoy app. Ideally it would either be mounted inside a buoy hull or taken onboard by boaties for instance.

And how accurate are the readings?
Getting better as progress is made on the backend. We have a code ready that extracts the wave parameters from the accelerometers but we are basically trying to source the best compromise between affordability and quality of the sensors.

Do you foresee smaller commercial companies launching their own buoys, or perhaps random boaters using your app and feeding information into a publicly accesible system?
Yes, this is part of the idea behind the development. This project is directly targeted at surf-clubs, small harbours... We would look at leveraging the GPS and telecom capabilities of the smartphones to link the data back to Swellmap.co.nz for real-time displays of wave height etcetera.

What are the limitations?
Some hardware is better than others, so it is difficult to develop a product that will work across a range of devices. The power usage will have to be well-thought out as we want to keep the weight to a minimum.

Are there any other ways the wave buoy app might be used?
Anything requiring the measurement of motion sensing could benefit from this technology.

So when will we see it for sale on iTunes?
All development has been on the Android platform to date. Releasing the app into the wild would only happen once we are confident the product works, and there are many hurdles to overcome, some hardware related. This is really a side-project that we only work on when not too busy with the rest of our activities. Many people are interested, some have even been thinking about similar devices. We do not have a deadline for it as we are not exactly relying on this potential technology to make money.

Well I think you've created an excellent an excellent invention and deserve a windfall.
Thanks, and thanks for your interest. We will try to keep working on this, whenever we have time. It is not created yet though...