Frankie's Space: https://unswio.herokuapp.com/
Nowadays due to the COVID-19 situation, students feel more socially disconnected than ever and are not getting the proper university campus experience. This in turn creates a negative impact on their mental health and could hinder their academic progress. An easy solution to this problem would be a chat app so students can talk with their friends but the problem with that solution is that it's not fun to use and it doesn’t give a student the campus experience.
Our prototype solution to this problem combines satellite imagery of a campus, and allows users to navigate it using their keyboard. Students can walk around campus interacting with other university students that are logged on, visiting well known locations and sceneries containing AI characters. Overall this app would provide tremendous value as it would seek to gamify the traditional boring online socialization techniques and bring people closer together through a familiar setting.
By being grounded in virtual geodata, students can start catching up with people at specific locations, such as lecture halls or event locations. They can also meet and chat to people they usually wouldn’t, outside their usual friend circle which many students would exclusively be talking to during isolation.
As this is a prototype we have only so far implemented the satellite map for the UNSW campus. But we can easily expand to other campuses.