Resonance

Inspiration

We were inspired by the Korean drama Love Alarm, which is an app that notifies you when someone nearby has feelings for you. We loved the premise, but wanted to ground it in something real: what if your body was the signal?

Dating apps have moved romance further from real life through endless swiping on digital screens. Resonance flips that. What if attraction could be felt before a word is spoken — not from a photo, but from the signals your body already produces?

What It Does

Resonance is a speculative Apple Watch and iOS app that detects mutual physical attraction using physiological signals — no profiles, no photos, no swiping.

The Apple Watch reads four biometric signals in real time: heart rate, HRV, breathing rate, and wrist temperature. These combine into a single resonance value.

When two people within 10 metres both exceed a mutual threshold, a quiet alert appears on both wrists. Both must confirm independently. Only then is a match made, and the system prompts the two to approach each other.

How We Built It

We started by brainstorming individually, then came together to converge on a direction. Once we'd landed on the core idea, we did secondary research into the physiology of attraction, including what signals the body produces when we feel drawn to someone, how proximity and unconscious mimicry affect heart rate and breathing, and how genetic compatibility may predispose certain pairs to stronger physiological responses. Research in this space suggests that attraction isn't just a feeling, but it also has measurable, biological correlates.

From there, we built a shared design system and began iterating in Figma and Figma Make. We used Figma Make to generate UI quickly from prompts, then manually refined the output to match our vision. We designed the full Apple Watch and iOS app UI, as well as a slide deck covering the concept, user flow, and ethical framework.

Challenges We Ran Into

Brainstorming took longer than expected. Even though our app is a speculative concept and technical implementation wasn't required, we found it difficult to stop thinking about feasibility. We weren't expected to answer questions like how are the signals read and sent, but coming from computer science backgrounds, we kept getting stuck at this point.

Figma Make was also a learning curve: prompts rarely produce exactly what we had in our minds, and knowing when to manually fix versus re-prompt took some calibration.

Accomplishments That We're Proud Of

We're proud of the concept itself. The idea that attraction could move back into the physical world feels genuinely new. Most dating app innovation is still just a variation on swiping. Resonance points in a completely different direction, and we genuinely believe it could change how people think about meeting someone in real life.

We're also proud of how much we were able to accomplish in a short amount of time across a diverse set of skills we were largely new to. Prompt engineering in Figma Make, building a slide deck, writing a concept narrative, scripting a video, directing and editing — none of us came in knowing how to do all of these things. The fact that we pulled it together into something cohesive is something we're genuinely proud of.

What We Learned

We learned that designing with AI is collaborative, not automatic. Figma Make accelerated our process, but there was still significant human input at every stage, from how we framed prompts to what we accepted and what we manually refined. We hit the limitations of prompt-based design quickly: complex interactions and precise visual hierarchy are hard to communicate through text alone, and the more specific our prompts, the better the output. We also learned how Apple Watch sensors work and what it means to design for a screen you glance at for two seconds. And beyond the product itself, we learned how to pitch through storytelling — scripting and editing the demo taught us that a strong idea still needs to be communicated well, and that framing Resonance as a story, not a feature list, made all the difference.

What's Next for Resonance

If we had more time, we'd run user testing among singles who are looking for relationships. The most important question is whether people would actually trust this and use it. We'd keep iterating on the design based on that feedback, and explore any new directions.