Safe Sight
Overview
Safe Sight is an AR safety lens built for Snap Spectacles. It lets users navigate, flag hazards, and access help, all without ever pulling out their phone.
The core insight driving the project: existing safety apps ask you to look down at your screen right when you can least afford to. Reaching for your phone reduces situational awareness, slows your reaction time, and can signal vulnerability to the people around you. We wanted to build something that kept you present with warnings, directions, and emergency tools surfaced directly in your field of view.
What it does
Safe Sight creates a shared, community-powered safety network overlaid on the real world. Users can:
Set a destination and receive AR turn-by-turn directions via a Google Maps-routed overlay arrow
Flag nearby dangers: suspicious individuals, environmental hazards, armed individuals, using palm-anchored buttons
Instantly broadcast reported hazards to other users within a one-mile radius via Snap Cloud
Receive real-time hazard notifications from nearby users and get re-routed around them
See the nearest campus emergency blue lights pinned in AR for immediate in-person help
Trigger an emergency mode that records five seconds of POV footage and sends it, along with your location, to trusted contacts through a companion iOS app
The goal was a system that gets more useful the more people use it like a shared safety network that grows with its community.
How we built it
The lens was built entirely in Lens Studio for Snap Spectacles. We designed every interaction to reduce phone dependency like quick-access palm actions, a minimal AR UI, and a smart notification system that only surfaces what's relevant right now.
On the backend, we integrated the Google Maps Routes API to generate walking-path waypoints for in-lens navigation, with real-time rerouting when hazards were flagged ahead. Hazard coordinates were synced globally using Snap Cloud, so location data stayed accurate and re-routing happened without lag.
The companion iOS app handled emergency video playback and location sharing for trusted contacts. Building the video buffer and upload pipeline was one of the hardest parts. Encoding and streaming reliably to Snap Cloud required a lot of iteration as well. The blue light system came together once we had the coordinate infrastructure in place; we stored MIT blue light station coordinates directly in the database and surfaced them as pinned AR markers.
Challenges
The hardest technical problem was stitching together the full backend under hackathon constraints. Getting the Google Maps Routes API to return usable waypoints for pedestrian AR navigation, and then rerouting dynamically based on live hazard data took most of our time.
Video encoding was its own battle. The frame capture, buffering, and upload system crashed repeatedly before we found a stable approach using the provided samples as a baseline. Getting the companion app to reliably fetch and stitch footage from Supabase and Snap Cloud was a long debugging process.
What I took away
Safe Sight was a reminder of how much the medium shapes the message. AR isn't just a visual layer, instead it's a way of keeping people connected to the world around them rather than pulling them out of it. Designing for Spectacles forced us to think carefully about attention: what earns a place in someone's field of view, and what's better left off-screen entirely.
Building for real-world risk also meant that technical execution and emotional intelligence had to move together. Our team's lived experiences as women navigating unfamiliar places were directly reflected in every design decision we made, from the minimal UI to the community alert system.
Where it could go
Safe Sight was built in a hackathon, but the problem it's solving has a lot more room. Edu email verification could tie the network to specific campuses, routing intelligence could expand using historical hazard data, and the alert system could integrate with official campus safety infrastructure. Beyond higher ed, the same model applies anywhere people navigate unfamiliar places like travel, new cities, and situations where pulling out your phone is the last thing you want to do.