AuraAtlas

Inspiration College can often feel like a lonely uphill battle, where the weight of exams and social pressure remains invisible until someone hits a breaking point. We noticed that while most mental health tools focus on the individual, they miss the communal pulse. We wanted to build something that turns "I feel stressed" into "We are feeling this together." AuraAtlas was born from the idea of making the invisible emotional climate of a campus visible, creating a shared 3D skyline that reminds students they aren't alone in their peaks or valleys.

What it does AuraAtlas is a real-time collective mental wellness platform that transforms anonymous mood check-ins into a 3D Emotional Skyline.

The Skyline: Using Mapbox fill-extrusion, mood data is rendered as vertical towers over real-world geography—tall red towers signal high stress in areas like libraries, while short blue pillars represent calm zones like parks.

Support System: Beyond visualization, it features a GPT-4o powered AI Therapist for somatic, empathetic support, a Voice Journal with sentiment analysis, and a "Hug" reaction system for community validation.

Campus Intelligence: It pre-loads data for 70+ colleges, offering institutions an aggregated "Vibe Score" and trend dashboards while protecting individual student privacy.

How we built it The project is built on a high-performance stack designed for real-time geospatial rendering:

Frontend: Next.js 16 (App Router) with TypeScript and Tailwind CSS v4 for a sleek, responsive UI.

Mapping & 3D: Mapbox GL JS 3 handles the 3D terrain and fill-extrusion layers, while Framer Motion and Three.js bring the emotional "weather" overlays to life.

Backend & AI: Supabase handles PostgreSQL storage and Auth. We integrated OpenAI’s GPT-4o for the conversational therapist and Whisper for transcribing voice journals.

Data Processing: A custom grid aggregator (gridAggregator.ts) processes raw coordinate points into GeoJSON polygons, allowing us to bypass traditional mapping limitations and render dense mood data as 3D structures.

Challenges we ran into One of the biggest technical hurdles was spatial data aggregation. Mapbox's fill-extrusion requires polygon geometry, but user check-ins are single points. We had to build a custom logic layer to group these points into a grid and dynamically calculate the height and color of each cell based on both report density and stress weight. Additionally, ensuring privacy at scale was tough; we implemented a redaction system that hides aggregated data if fewer than five participants are in a specific zone to prevent re-identification.

Accomplishments that we're proud of Visualizing Emotion: Seeing the "Emotional Weather" and 3D towers actually reflect the vibe of a city or campus in real-time was a massive "Aha!" moment.

Seamless Integration: Successfully bridging complex geospatial data with empathetic AI tools and a full social friend system.

Performance: Achieving smooth 60° pitch navigation and "flying" between 11 major supported cities without lag, despite the heavy 3D rendering.

What we learned We learned a lot about Geospatial UI/UX—specifically how to represent abstract concepts like "anxiety" or "calm" through color interpolation and vertical scale without making the map feel cluttered. We also gained deep experience in AI safety, specifically building crisis detection triggers that automatically surface 988 hotline resources when the sentiment engine flags concerning language.

What's next for AuraAtlas The map is just the beginning. We plan to expand the AR Mode so students can point their cameras at a campus building and see a glow reflecting its current "vibe." We are also looking into deeper integration with campus counseling centers to provide a seamless hand-off from the AI therapist to human professionals when the "Smile Score" indicates a student needs more intensive support.

Built With

• analysis)
• auth
• email@turf/circle
• gemini
• google
• leaflet.heat
• next.js-16-(app-router
• openai-gpt-4o-(therapist
• recharts
• remotion
• resendreact
• stripe
• supabase
• tailwind
• typescript
• whisper-(transcription)
• zod