InterFace - An Internet of People

problem

perceived barrier


Our civilisations have evolved over time but we have retained ancient cognitive traits that are arguably unuseful in today’s society. In particular, we still retain the perceived barrier and hesitance to meeting new people and forging new meaningful relationships. Our team strove to shatter this barrier using the 2016 MIT Kickstart Hackathon in Hong Kong as an opportunity, where we became the winning team.

Furthermore:

  1. We are time starved
  2. We often ignore tangible world in favour of intangible content on screens
  3. We have a mental capacity for around 100 friends

the case for conferences

We took a look at existing settings where connections were encouraged and was the main value proposition for being there. With my team’s connections to academic and startup institutions, conferences were concluded to be a fertile ground for development, because of:

  1. Time criticality in conferences
  2. People meet the wrong people
  3. Current apps for conference engagement suck

solution - InterFace

The idea is to have a lanyard with your preferences and profile loaded from your conference signup form you had to do anyway. The lanyard that will be worn by conference goers has tactile feedback on the neck and a visual cue that blinks at the same frequency and colour as another person nearby provided you both have sufficiently overlapping interests.




vision

With this concept and prototype, we envision it to be used to connect people in conferences in settings such as university events, corporate events, and other places where attendees are looking to meet new people in a limited amount of time. We also envision to push this concept out of the confines of conferences and use it to capture physical social connections using virtual social data.



Project done with

Jasmine Rubonovitz

Jonathan Ching

Anthony Occidentale

Nathan Monroe