Inspiration

Lately I have been spending a lot of time working in busy areas like Shibuya Crossing and Asakusa Temple. When trying to meet up with colleagues I found it was difficult to pinpoint each other’s location using chat tools. We would message back and forth while both wandering around and it was generally inefficient and ineffective.

This inspired me to create the Friend Finder, a simple way to instantly show the location of a friend in a crowded area without needing to send chat messages or call them.

What it does

The app allows friends to find each other without needing to message back and forth.

How we built it

I built the project using the Google Geospatial API in combination with Photon Unity Networking framework to allow users to share their geospatial pose over the internet.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge in this project was to create an aesthetic that was effective at communicating the location of the other users at a wide range of distances. Keeping this simple worked best for this project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I am quite proud of how natural and easy the app is to use.

What we learned

The main thing I learned from creating this app was that keeping things as simple as possible can create a stronger prototype than trying to add too many features and functions.

What's next for Friend Finder

I think this concept could be used for more than friends finding each other. I imagine it could be very useful for letting tourists find tour guides and therefore give tourists more confidence to go and explore , knowing that they can instantly find their way back to their group. For the next step I would like to create an version of this app that would allow tour guides to not only share their position but breadcrumbs to allow users to go and find other interesting locations more easily.

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