Coordin8

Inspiration

I had the worst time at my local Ukrainian festival last summer. I spent nearly twenty minutes just trying to find a bathroom, missed half the performances because the schedule changed and nobody told anyone, and ended up asking five different strangers where the food tent was. I got home irritated that a problem this basic still exists in 2026. That frustration is where Coordin8 started.

What it does

A host drops a pin on their actual venue, adds the relevant details, and sets who is allowed to attend, and Coordin8 instantly spins up a live page for that event. Anyone attending just scans a code and gets a real-time map of their friends, a chat assistant that actually answers their questions, and a live three-dimensional model of the real building so they are never left wandering around lost. Everything updates the moment the host changes it, so nobody is relying on a printed flyer or an outdated group chat message.

How we built it

We built the entire frontend in plain JavaScript with Three.js handling the three-dimensional rendering. Real building and street data gets pulled live from OpenStreetMap the moment a host drops a pin, and a real Groq language model powers the chat assistant guests interact with. The whole app is hosted on Render, so it runs live with no local setup required.

Challenges we ran into

Getting the three-dimensional buildings to actually align with real GPS coordinates took far longer than we expected. We spent hours chasing a bug where stairwells kept rendering outside the building's walls, only to eventually realize our own coordinate math had the axis flipped the entire time. Small errors like that are easy to miss until you are staring at a staircase floating in midair.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Every building on that map is generated live the instant someone drops a pin, not a premade model we built ahead of time. That means the app genuinely works for any real address, not just the one we happened to test with. Watching a real building appear with accurate floors and a stairwell, generated purely from public map data, never stopped feeling impressive to us.

What we learned

We learned just how much real math is hiding behind something that looks simple on screen, from coordinate conversion to polygon geometry. We also learned how easy it is to get your coordinates backwards and not notice for hours, since the bug still technically "worked," it just mirrored everything. Small assumptions compound fast once you are working in three dimensions.

What's next for Coordin8

Next, we want to add real user accounts instead of the local demo login, and expand the level of detail our building generation can capture. Longer term, our goal is getting actual schools, hospitals, and event venues to adopt Coordin8 for real events, not just hackathon demos. We think the core idea, real navigation generated from real data, has a lot of room to grow.