In Real Life (IRL)

• 

  In a professional setting, IRL can be used to connect colleagues and potential employers.

• 

  IRL can be used to share your passions with others.

• 

  IRL can be used to break the ice and streamline social settings.

I think it’s important to acknowledge that social media is fantastic. It’s a medium through which people can express their ideas, feelings, and memories to anyone at any time. It allows people to share photos or coordinate events with friends and colleagues and even communicate with family members on the other side of the world. However, the irony of social media is that the more connected we become, the more disconnected we feel from many of the people we interact with in our daily lives. Casual social interactions are rapidly becoming a thing of the past, and it's because we don't have to be social in public to communicate anymore. With IRL, we see an opportunity to make social media truly social. We plan to create a fully integrated and interactive application that uses real life as its platform, encouraging people to go outside, strike up a conversation, and make their life legitimately social again. IRL will create an augmented reality avatar and profile above the user’s head which will be visible to other app users and will contain links to any of the social media outlets which they choose to share publicly. Other app users can then use the cameras on their phones to see the avatar above your head. If at any point you don’t want to have your information being public you can turn your avatar off so other people can’t see it. We hope that IRL will be a new phenomenon that works to make being social a human thing again.