uniVerse

Bringing your campus closer: connect, chat, and share with students around you.

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At SFU, students often describe campus life as disconnected, so we designed UniVerse to make it easier and more natural to meet, help, and share resources with each other across campus.

Inspiration

Our inspiration came from Uber and Amber Alert systems. We saw how powerful portable, location-based communication can be. Whether for coordination or safety, we wanted to bring that same real-time connectivity to a university setting.

What it does

UniVerse is a proximity-based app for university students to request or offer help instantly, from grabbing coffee or finding study buddies to small on-campus favors. It lets users broadcast short, location-aware posts (like “Need a ride to class” or “Anyone studying in AQ?”), similar in spirit to an Amber Alert for everyday help.

Users have the option to specify if they want their broadcast to be sent only to nearby users, or a specific part of campus. The app encourages community, convenience, and climate-consciousness by reducing redundant trips and connecting nearby students.

How we built it

React Native was used for our mobile frontend. Node.js + Websockets were used for real-time communication and support for chat room grouping in our broadcasts. Firebase was used for authentication and user profiles.

Challenges we ran into

  • React Native was rather janky when providing location to our app, causing issues on initial setup
  • UI was having a stroke pretty often
  • Broadcast room management was rather difficult as we had to manage what rooms a specific user would be part of.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • We managed to setup a working mobile app (it was all of our first time working with React Native!) .
  • Location was working pretty well near the end, allowing for full functionality.
  • We managed to add every feature we wanted to add during our planning phase.

What we learned

  • Mobile development
  • Working with lots of websocket rooms

What's next for uniVerse

Ideally we would like to integrate more features to provide features to students. Some features, e.g. our food delivery service, could have payment services to provide students a more local/cheaper version of Uber. Expanding our app to other campuses aside from SFU would also be something we'd want to look into.

We would also want to add other security features i.e. only allowing school emails for university users.

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