Case study · Geospatial · Mobile PWA
Freedive Map
A map that tells freedivers and spearos whether the ocean is good for diving today, one score, built from five live data sources.
- What we did
- Product design + full build
- Year
- 2025
- Type
- Geospatial · Mobile PWA
The problem
Before a dive, you want to know one thing: is the water any good right now? But the answer is scattered. You'd open one site for the swell, another for wind, a weather app for the forecast, somewhere else for water temperature, and the Bureau of Meteorology for tides, then try to add it all up in your head while standing on the beach.
It's slow, it's a guess, and you still don't really know if the spot you're driving to will be calm or churned up.
One score, five sources
We boil the whole ocean down to a single dive score out of 100. Drop a pin anywhere on the coast and it reads the waves, currents, wind, water clarity and temperature, weighs them the way a diver actually would, and gives you a plain answer: good, okay, or stay home.
Tap the score and it opens up, so you can see exactly which condition is dragging it down.
five data sources
Reading the ocean
The whole thing lives on a map. Pins mark known dive sites, but you can tap anywhere on the coastline and pull live conditions for that exact spot, plus a 96-hour timeline so you can pick the best window this week. Recent fish and marine-life sightings show up too, pulled from citizen-science records.
Finding calm water
Here's the clever bit. Whether a spot is calm depends on how much open water the wind has to build waves across, called fetch. A headland to windward can shelter a bay completely. So for any point you tap, we fire rays out across the sea in every direction, measure how far each one travels before it hits land, and feed that into a classic wave-growth formula. The result: we can tell you a spot is sheltered before you drive an hour to find out it isn't.
dive score 70
In plain terms: the app does the geometry a local who knows the spot does in their head, automatically, for the entire Australian coastline.
Under the hood
Five independent data feeds, stitched into one fast, offline-capable app you can install on your phone like a native one.
Outcome
Freedive Map turns a five-tab guessing game into a single glance. Pick a spot, read the score, check your window, go. It covers the whole Australian coast and runs on the phone in your pocket, no app store, no sign-up.
"The geometry a local does in their head, automated for an entire coastline."