UNIFY

Inspiration

After we first heard the main concept, we got the idea of connecting people. After some research and discussion, we realized that people often share the same spaces without ever interacting.

This gave us the idea of building a proximity chat like in video games, helping people connect and solving the problem of feeling lonely even when surrounded by people.

What it does

UNIFY is a proximity-based social platform that helps university students discover and connect with people around them.

Students first need to verify their identity, meaning the community will consist entirely of students. UNIFY then uses their current location to find other students near them, giving them an opportunity to connect.

We want UNIFY to be different from other social media platforms where you scroll endlessly to find someone. Instead, we use the fact that you are physically close to one another to create an opportunity to meet someone new.

How we built it

Due to the time constraints, we focused on building an MVP that demonstrates the core ideas of our concept.

Our current MVP combines:

University verification to establish a trusted student community
Location-based discovery to identify nearby students
Proximity matching to surface potential connections
Real-time messaging to let students start conversations
A modern, simple frontend designed to make meeting people feel natural

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest challenge was figuring out how to turn the human problem of feeling lonely and disconnected into a problem where we could try to use technology to help solve it. The human problem was quite vague and something many people experience, so it was difficult to come up with an idea that could address it.

Another big challenge was user privacy. Even though location is very important to UNIFY, we didn't want it to expose the current location of a user. We had to think more deeply about this and ended up designing the system around who is nearby rather than revealing someone's exact location.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our biggest accomplishment would be taking the broad concept of this hackathon and turning it into a problem that people around us experience, then using technology to try to solve that problem.

Another accomplishment would be how simple our concept is. Instead of simply creating another social media platform that replaces real social interactions with online ones, UNIFY encourages real-world social interactions to help people make new connections.

What we learned

We learned that scope is very important for projects with a small time limit. There will always be more ideas than we can implement within the time available, so we have to find a product that takes the least amount of time to build while still showing the full concept of our idea.

What's next for UNIFY

Currently, we only have USYD as the available university for UNIFY, but we want to expand our range of universities (UNSW, UTS, Macquarie, etc.) so more students can use UNIFY to make new connections.

We also want to implement a way for people nearby to plan events together. We could connect UNIFY with apps like USU, which allow students to see current events. Students could then say they want to find people to go with, allowing them to attend events together and make new connections.