Nearness helps you stay connected with friends and family, through the magical powers of the Internet of Things.

The app helps you set up geofences in your iOS device, and then submits your approximate location to the cloud service Cosm.

We use it to build little physical avatars to show who is nearby, you might call them "glanceable interfaces" or presence indicators. It's a great way to see who is home and who is at work, without taking your phone out of your pocket.

To use Nearness to its potential, you need to set up a physical visualization of the data feed. If you know a thing or two about micro-controllers such as Arduino, it's a fairly simple process to set up your own physical avatar.

Here are some ideas for things you can make;
A light that pulsates when you're nearby
A cuckoo clock that shows a little person with a briefcase when you're at work, and a little person in his/her pajamas when you're at home.

This is the initial release, and we have a bunch of interesting features lined up. We aim to provide some simple code snippets to use for retrieving the data and presenting it.

☞ Privacy

We are of course very aware of the privacy implications of logging and storing information about where you are. The location data is stored privately in your own personal account at Cosm, and only you control the app's access to your data feed.