Sonder

Inspiration

We were inspired by the concept of sonder — the realization that every person lives a life as complex and vivid as your own. We were also influenced by apps like Instagram and food review platforms like Beli and Yelp, where meaning and experiences are often tied to specific places or objects.

During early ideation, we explored how future technologies might allow people to access another person's lived experience. However, through mentor feedback, we realized that curiosity alone would not be enough to sustain engagement. This led us to reframe the idea around meaningful real-world moments and focus on situations where people need to understand someone else's emotional relationship with places and objects.

This shifted our focus toward empathy in high-stakes situations such as grief, major life decisions, and relationship transitions.

What it does

Sonder is an AR experience paired with a companion mobile app that reveals the emotional memories people associate with physical objects and environments.

Using a speculative neural capture technology, Sonder records sensory fragments tied to meaningful moments in a person’s life, including sights, sounds, emotions, and reflections. These memories are anchored to the objects or places where they occurred.

When users explore a space wearing an AR headset, subtle visual anchors appear over objects that carry emotional significance. By focusing on an anchor for a few seconds using gaze-based interaction, users unlock a short fragment of the original person’s experience.

Instead of simply being told that an object mattered to someone, users can briefly feel the emotional context behind it. This allows them to perceive something that is normally invisible: the emotional resonance between a person and the environments they inhabit.

Sonder is designed for moments where empathy matters, such as families navigating grief, prospective students imagining life on a campus, or individuals trying to understand a relationship after it has changed.

How we built it

We used FigJam to for organizing research, brainstorming, and early concept development. Because the FigBuild prompt was intentionally abstract, we spent significant time exploring multiple directions before converging on the idea of externalizing emotional experiences.

Once the concept was clarified, we designed the XR interaction layer and companion app interface in Figma. We used Figma Make to generate early layout directions for some complex screens and then iterated on them manually to better match our interaction model.

Our Figma prototypes (Companion App, AR Experience) demonstrate key parts of the full experience, including:

memory anchors appearing over objects
gaze-based interaction for unlocking memories
emotion-based visual cues
a companion mobile app for reviewing discovered memories and reflecting on experiences.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges was the ambiguity of the FigBuild prompt. Initially, we struggled to decide which human sense we wanted to enhance, track, or visualize.

Our first direction focused on curiosity-driven exploration of strangers’ memories in public environments. However, through mentor feedback we realized this approach lacked a strong enough motivation for people to repeatedly use the product. If the experience was competing with every other activity someone could do with their time, it needed a clearer purpose.

This forced us to rethink our framing and anchor the idea in specific real-world use cases where empathy and emotional understanding actually affect decisions and relationships.

Another challenge was balancing speculative technology with believable design. Our initial concept relied heavily on futuristic assumptions, so we worked to ground the experience in scenarios that felt emotionally plausible and socially meaningful.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we were able to take a very abstract prompt and evolve it into a more grounded and thoughtful concept within a short amount of time.

Through research, mentor feedback, and iteration, we transformed our initial idea into a clearer design focused on empathy, emotional understanding, and meaningful life transitions.

What we learned

One of our biggest takeaways from this project was the importance of the stages before design. We initially underestimated how much time research and ideation would require, especially given how open-ended the prompt was. Most of our time ended up being spent defining the problem and refining the concept. While this left less time for polishing the final prototype, it ultimately helped us create a much stronger and more focused idea.

We also learned the value of external feedback. Our meeting with a mentor helped us realize that curiosity alone was not a strong enough value proposition, and that grounding speculative ideas in clear real-world scenarios makes them much more compelling.

In the future, we would aim to make key conceptual decisions earlier so that we could spend more time refining the interaction design and user experience.