Six Degrees

Six degrees of separation stand between any two people on Earth. Bridge this distance and discover our common humanity with Six Degrees — an app that shows how strangers truly are to each other.

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Inspiration

Just six degrees of separation stand between any two individuals on Earth. Yet, in today's digital age, our screens often overshadow the people right beside us. We've become engrossed in virtual connections, neglecting the vibrant communities around us.

But what if we shifted our focus to our shared humanity?

Imagine a world where we prioritize real-life interactions over virtual ones. Our app seeks to do just that. It challenges the conventional notion of mobile apps by encouraging users to spend less time on their devices and more time engaging with their surroundings.

Let's break free from the digital bubble and embrace genuine connections. Let's meet face-to-face, fostering meaningful relationships and discovering the richness of our communities. Our app is not just about technology; it's about bringing people together, bridging the gap between screens and real life.

Join us in revolutionizing the way we connect— IRL.

What it does

Six Degrees is an innovative mobile application that connects people in real-life settings by showing them how closely they are connected through their existing social and professional networks. It leverages users' contact books and cutting-edge AI to visualize connections and suggest conversation topics based on shared interests and common connections, encouraging more meaningful face-to-face interactions.

How we built it

  1. Contact Book Integration: The app accesses the user's contact list to identify and display the chain of connections between them and other users nearby.
  2. AI-Driven Insights: Utilizing the Google Gemini API, the app analyzes user data obtained directly from the user and through scraping links provided to draw up personalized conversation starters and highlights commonalities to foster genuine interactions.
  3. Proximity Awareness: Using Apple’s Nearby Interaction framework and Ultra-Wideband (UWB) technology with Multipeer Connectivity (MPC), Six Degrees detects other users in close physical proximity, allowing users to engage with people around them.
  4. User Interface: Developed using SwiftUI and SpriteKit, the app offers a clean, responsive, and intuitive user interface tailored for iOS devices, ensuring a seamless user experience.

Challenges we ran into

  1. UWB connectivity doesn’t support data transfer, so we had to use MPC to allow for inter-device communication instead
  2. Physics springs didn’t work between nodes, so we had to dig through documentation to fix linkages between nodes in our graph visuals
  3. Needed to come up with an efficient way to hold all the contact metadata in our database— we’re dealing with millions of potential data points, and also needed to support dijkstra's algorithm. We did lots of research into how to hold and manipulate graph data
  4. Minor epidemic among our team members :(

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  1. We built an interactive physics spring/graph system almost from scratch
  2. Used UWB to allow networkless contact sharing and linking
  3. Developed multimodal web-scraping tool that scrapes data from user-provided links, including both text and image data, which was then fed through Gemini’s API
  4. Performed graph representation, traversal, and optimization on our backend server to find optimal routes between two connections
  5. Got sleep every day! :D

What we learned

Beyond the technical aspects of our project, which took monumental effort to pull off cohesively, we learned a lot about the logistical and emotional aspects related to building an entire project and pitch within 36 hours. Pacing is paramount when it comes to staying on track and on schedule; it doesn’t matter how much work you can get done in 2 hours if you can’t keep the rate up. Getting rest and eating well (eating pasta!) is equally important. Finding a workspace that keeps you productive is also fundamental. In our case, we found a conference room with a whiteboard (very useful for brainstorming and planning), with excellent lighting and comfortable workstations. Overall, investing a little time into our mental and physical health goes a long way in terms of productivity.

What's next for Six Degrees

When we originally planned our project, we actually came up with tons of ambitious ideas and features we wanted to implement, but didn’t have much time to develop further, such as (but not limited to):

  • Map and location data to show you geographically close contacts and mutuals
  • Profile Pictures! (we simply didn’t have the time to include this) Beyond more features, Six Degrees could benefit highly from advertising and promotion, as it depends on a large initial user-base to function efficiently. There would be too many isolated subgraphs. However, we believe that the app’s uniqueness and minimalistic approach would greatly aid its proliferation.

Note: Our github repository (and some other locations) refer to our project as "LookUp," but we've since settled on Six Degrees.

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