Inspiration Nextdoor has 33 million users because neighbors genuinely want to connect. But it's a feed. You open it, scroll it, close it. It has no sense of place — no feeling that the person who wrote that post lives three doors down, walks the same sidewalk, passes the same bench every morning. We kept asking: what if community didn't live on a screen? What if it lived in the street? The walkie-talkie was the original tool for instant local voice. You press, you talk, someone nearby hears you. We took that idea and gave it to an entire neighborhood — asynchronously, spatially, permanently anchored to the places that matter.
What it does TalkieWalkie is a spatial voice layer for your neighborhood, built on Snap Spectacles. As you walk through your community, you encounter voice bubbles — glowing translucent spheres anchored to real physical locations. Each bubble was left by a neighbor. Each one grows as more people contribute.
Two types of bubbles Memory bubbles — long-lived. A neighbor records a story about a place, others step inside and respond. Grows larger with every voice.
Utility bubbles — 24 to 48 hours. Lost dog on the corner. Free produce at the gate. Farmers market this Saturday.
When you step inside a bubble the creator's voice plays automatically. Move around and contributor voices come from their spatial positions, fading as you drift away. Reach the outer edge, pinch and hold to record your own. The bubble grows a little bigger. No app. No feed. Just go for a walk.
No app to open. No feed to scroll. No social anxiety to overcome. You just go for a walk.
How we built it Built entirely on Snap's native stack — Spectacles Sync Kit for session state and bubble sync, Location Cloud Storage for GPS + SLAM anchoring, the native Audio engine for spatial distance attenuation, and Spectacles Interaction Kit for the pinch-hold gesture. No external backend. The Lens is written in TypeScript in Lens Studio 5.
Challenges we ran into Multiplayer sync between two Spectacles was our biggest hurdle. Indoors, GPS wasn't reliable — each device resolved its world coordinates differently, placing the bubble several meters off for the second user. We fixed this by ditching GPS anchoring and switching to Snap's session-based colocated mapping, using a shared session ID and SLAM-relative anchors so both headsets locked onto the same world origin. The bubble finally appeared in the same place for both users.
Built With
- lensstudio
- typescript
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