Wanderers

Inspiration

We came to UWaterloo and found ourselves surrounded by tens of thousands of people and somehow still eating alone. Every app we opened showed a perfectly curated version of someone else's social life. Nothing answered the simplest question: who's free right now, and where are they? That was the gap we wanted to close.

What it does

Wanderers is a campus-only social app that gets university students from "I'm free right now" to "I'm with real people" in minutes. Students verify with their university email, browse interest-based bubbles on a live map, join a bubble to unlock the exact location and group chat, and post a Moments photo after the meetup. No highlight reels, no strangers, no algorithm.

How we built it

Four UWaterloo students, one hackathon. We used Next.js for the frontend, Supabase for auth and real-time database, and Google Maps API for the bubble map layer. University email verification runs through a custom OTP flow. Bubble locations are approximate until a user joins, then exact coordinates unlock alongside a scoped group chat via Supabase Realtime. We trained our own recommendation model using scikit-learn with K-Means clustering, an unsupervised learning approach that personalizes bubble suggestions based on each student's interests and activity patterns. We also integrated the Gemini API to summarize activity context and guide users through creating bubbles more intuitively. The landing page uses Spline 3D for the hero animation.

Challenges we ran into

Scoping. Every idea felt essential: business bubbles with live capacity, niche community matching, friend suggestions. The filter we kept returning to was simple: if it does not get someone from "I'm free" to "I'm with people," cut it. That killed a lot of features we liked. It also kept the product focused and shippable.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Building a safety model that works by architecture, not by policy. A university email gate means an 18-year-old student cannot run into a 40-year-old stranger. No live location broadcast until you join. We did not write rules and hope people follow them, we made the unsafe behaviour structurally impossible.

What we learned

The hardest product decisions are philosophical, not technical. Every feature forced a question: does this make people more authentic, or less? Restricting Moments to in-the-moment, meetup-anchored photos felt counterintuitive at first. It turned out to be the feature that defines the whole product.

What's next for Wanderers

Persistent business bubbles: local restaurants, cafes, bowling alleys, and laser tag venues pay to host a bubble at their location showing live capacity and accepting in-app reservations. Then a university B2B dashboard selling anonymized engagement analytics to student unions. The long-term vision is authentic communities for any niche interest, starting at UWaterloo and expanding campus by campus.