Exposure: An app to meet new people

As the world becomes ever more caught up in the online sphere, people are increasingly relying on dating apps in order to meet partners. However, dating applications have been postulated to promote the objectification of users, catalyse discrimination and eradicate the slow, intimate courtship that traditionally precedes falling in love. Previous application developers have sought to overcome these issues through obscuring a user’s physical appearance until they have engaged in a sufficient level of conversation with their match. However, in these applications, discrimination can still occur based on factors other than users’ physical appearance. Other applications have taken a different approach to decreasing superficiality in dating apps, encouraging users to play games to get to know one another better. Unfortunately, users still complain that this doesn’t prevent people choosing a match based on their physical appearances. Our application intends to extend upon these previous applications, obscuring not just the physical appearance of our users, but all traits, letting these traits be exposed one at a time as the users interact with each other. We will also exploit gamification within our app, using simple games to generate more meaningful conversations amongst users, allowing them to get to know each other for more than just their surface level appearances and traits. We propose that through combining and extending upon previous techniques, we can remove the superficiality plaguing modern day mobile dating.