RipCo is my Year 12 Design and Technology major work: a free iPhone app that reads public beach cameras and outlines likely rip currents on the live view. This page covers the need, the research, the decisions and where the project is up to.
Rip currents are the leading cause of drowning on Australian beaches. Surf Life Saving Australia’s National Coastal Safety Report 2025 counted 154 coastal drowning deaths in 2024–25, the highest number on record, with a rip involved in at least 37% of beach drowning deaths. Its 2018 coastal safety survey found that three in four people could not spot a rip from the beach.
Between the flags on a patrolled beach, lifeguards are reading the water for you. Outside patrol hours, or away from the flags, you are on your own judgement, and the 2025 report notes that every coastal drowning death that year happened at an unpatrolled location, outside patrol hours or away from the flags.
The gap I found was plain: most people can’t read a rip from the sand, and many beaches already have a public camera looking straight at the surf. RipCo is a way to read those feeds.
Six stages, from a hazard most people can’t see to a prototype running on a real camera. Each one fed the next, and the criteria below came out of the first two.
Rip currents are the leading cause of drowning on Australian beaches, and most people cannot pick one from the sand. The published reports set the scale; the survey confirmed it locally.
A survey of beachgoers, a structured interview with a Surf Life Saving NSW patrol member at Manly, and the national coastal safety reports.
Use the public cameras already pointed at the surf, and put the reading on the phone people already carry to the beach.
An iPhone app with live cameras, conditions, a risk score and alerts, and a computer-vision model developed on footage from a public camera at Manly Beach.
The model run on the Manly camera and its outlines checked against the water, with the limits recorded as they appeared: night, glare, rain, distance.
The prototype judged against the design criteria below, and the next steps set: open the early-access list, submit to App Review, test the next beach.
Two pieces of primary research shaped the app, alongside the published reports. The full method and results are in my design folio.
I asked beachgoers how they check conditions and whether they could pick a rip. 78% could not confidently identify a rip current from the beach; 84% said they would use a mobile tool that shows rips on a live camera view; 69% already check conditions before they go.
A structured interview with a Surf Life Saving NSW patrol member at Manly Beach. It shaped the safety commitment: no “safe” verdict anywhere in the app, and the flags and the lifeguards first on every screen. The views are mine, and nothing on this site is endorsed by Surf Life Saving.
Surf Life Saving Australia’s National Coastal Safety Reports and its coastal safety survey, the rip current research of the UNSW Beach Safety Research Group, and BeachSafe’s public beach information. They are listed under sources.
Most of these came out of the research. The rest came from testing the app on a real camera and seeing what a wrong answer would cost.
New hardware would need money, permission and maintenance at every beach. Public cameras already look at the surf, so the cost of adding a beach is software and testing.
A tick or a cross would ask you to trust the model. An outline shows where it is looking and the percentage shows how sure it is, so you can check both against what you see.
Each beach card carries a risk score out of 100 built from the live conditions, labelled as a level of risk. The lowest band is still a level of risk, and the word safe does not appear anywhere in the app.
The reminder to swim between the red and yellow flags sits inside the app, because the app’s job is to send people towards the patrolled area.
A safety tool behind a paywall protects the people who pay. RipCo has no subscription and no premium version.
Manly Beach and iPhone, so the detection could be developed and tested in one place before anything else was added.
Each criterion traces back to the need or the research. This is the list the prototype is evaluated against.
| Criterion | Where it comes from | How the app meets it |
|---|---|---|
| Show a likely rip on the live view in a form a beachgoer can read at a glance | 78% of survey respondents could not confidently identify a rip | A red outline with a confidence figure on the live camera view, one tap away on the Detect tab |
| Never say a beach is safe | The patrol-member interview; Surf Life Saving guidance that the flags come first | No safe verdict anywhere in the app; the risk score is framed as risk; the flags line sits under every beach card |
| Work with cameras that already exist | New hardware needs money, permission and maintenance at every beach | Reads public camera feeds; nothing to install or mount |
| Say when it cannot see | Night, rain and glare defeat any camera-based model | Detection shown as unavailable instead of guessed; a confidence figure on every outline |
| Give the whole picture for a beach in one place | 69% already check conditions before they go, across several sites | Conditions, risk score, live camera, alerts and patrol status on one screen |
| Free, on the phone people already carry | 84% said they would use a mobile tool; a paywall protects only those who pay | A free iPhone app with no subscription |
To the Surf Life Saving NSW patrol member at Manly who gave their time for the interview. Their advice shaped the app; it is not an endorsement of it.
Weather and marine data by Open-Meteo under CC BY 4.0. Map tiles by CARTO from OpenStreetMap contributors, drawn with Leaflet. Type set in Newsreader, by Production Type, and Geist, by Vercel, both under the SIL Open Font License.
Designed and built in Sydney Year 12 Design and Technology major work, 2026