Bubbles is an app for meeting new people -- anytime, anywhere.
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In this day and age, people are often busy and distracted by their electronic devices. Interactions with strangers has significantly lessened, and many potential meaningful relationships are missed. It is clinically proven that the lack of face to face interactions leads to higher chance of depression.
With Bubbles, we aim to lower the barrier for people to start talking with new people, and to meet up offline. Because we believe that nothing can exactly replicate interactions you have in the real world.
We chose to tackle the problem by creating a 'meet up' application that is based on your location. Based on your interests, at most 5 people will show up on the home page as 'bubbles' that you can interact with. Due to the close proximity, it is easy to immediately meetup in real life and make new friends.
When you pop the bubble, you can choose to interact with this person, and chat with them. Anonymity is also ensured because no photos are displayed.
The app will then ideally allow the two to find a common ground soon after messaging, and users decide to meet up.
For our front end, we decided to use React Native to give the most varied compatibility. So that we do not need to code on different languages for Android and iOs.
For our back end, python Flask was the most logical option due to the readability and our familiarity with the language.
We used Spacy, which uses linear algebra to relate the closeness of people's interest and allows us to match people with similar interests.
The main challenge was our physical limitations. Some of our group members fell sick, while others simply pushed themselves too far, which proved to be detrimental to our work efficiency.
Our other challenge was our lack of knowledge when using React Native. This further slowed our speed down simply because we had to read through documentations and take longer to understand code snippets.
We take pride in our simplistic yet eye catching design, representing peoples as fleeting bubbles, symbolising how easy it is to miss and how ephemeral it is to chance to talk to most people.
This simplistic design does not stop only at the components, but throughout the whole application, the app aims to forge connections through physical interactions, so we placed less emphasis on adding many features that may bloat the software
While we were mentally prepared for the hackathon, we failed to take into account our physical condition.
For our future features, we plan to further encourage initiative for face to face meetups by limiting chats to only when you are in close proximity.