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  Sonder's Logo

Sonder-CutieHack2018

Sonder (noun): The realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

We created Sonder, an app that bridges augmented reality with true reality to give people a more convenient and enjoyable daily experience. This app allows its users to post and pin a comment to a certain location. Other users on that commenter’s friends list can then access that comment when they are within 0.2 miles of the location.

Augmented Reality:

These comments are delivered via augmented reality; a projection of a user-created character on the surrounding environment through the smartphone camera. If a commenter wishes, friends can also search for various locations farther away and see their comments. We submitted a demo version of our idea for Sonder. We thought about this idea when considering which kind of social media had not been created.

GPS Tracking:

The secondary file we submitted is the concept for the actual Sonder app. It allows us to use GPS coordinates to evaluate whether or not a particular user is in the vicinity of one of their friend’s comments of a location, acting as a proof of concept. Social media has always been seen as an instrument to reach the entirety of the world; Sonder challenges this notion by creating an equally social app, with closer relationships.

Struggles

We ran into trouble in creating the AR system through Unity, as it was confusing and ultimately never ended up working. In addition, none of us had ever used android studio, so a good portion of our time was devoted to learning the platform. Finally, we had troubles trying to create a GPS location monitor, but we did end up succeeding in creating a proof of concept.

Built With

• android-studio
• java