Tiffany Luo, Eric Huang, Shuai Wang, & Bruce Zhang

311 Live

311 Live is a live, multimodal civic reporting product that reimagines how residents communicate city issues. Instead of filling out static forms, residents can speak naturally while showing a problem through their phone camera. Built as an upgrade to NYC311 APP, 311 Live listens, sees, asks follow‑up questions, and transforms a vague complaint into a clear, actionable story, capturing safety, accessibility, urgency, and recurrence alongside a structured service request. In one scenario, a report of “trash” becomes a detailed case: garbage bags are blocking the sidewalk. By capturing these details, the system helps surface accessibility and safety risks for vulnerable pedestrians, including wheelchair users, and parents with strollers, and supports faster, more appropriate responses.

Elissa Rae Ecker & Adriana Valdez Young

Better friend

Better friend harnesses the power of the original technology: people and culture. When you find yourself alone, ecstatic, anxious, hungry, uncomfortable, wild, dejected, thrilled, deranged, exalted, or bored, you can turn to your Better friend. Better friend is a non-digital being hosted by you. You can chat with yourself any time, look at yourself in the mirror, and check your teeth after you wolf down that everything bagel. Be yourself — there’s nothing better.

betterfriend.shop

Imran Zaidi

Pulse NYC

Pulse NYC is an interactive visualization of trips taken through New York City — every single taxi, subway, Uber, Lyft, and Citibike ride — across each day in 2025. Huge amounts of raw data have been processed and interpreted to create an hour-to-hour, minute-to-minute heartbeat of the city. It's a tribute to the power of open data, and the richest visualization ever created for human movement at urban scale.

Ananya Shiriyar Nayak, Sirisha Manjunathan, Neha Sridhara, & Karthik Ashoka Mudenahalli

Routely

Routely is a voice-first AI agent that gives New Yorkers real-time subway intelligence — delays, service alerts, elevator outages, and more — through natural conversation. Powered by Google's Gemini Live API and live MTA GTFS feeds (no API key required), it lets commuters ask: "Is the A train running?" or "Any delays on the L?" and get an instant, spoken answer. Built for the Build With AI NYC Hackathon 2026, it demonstrates how multimodal AI agents can make public infrastructure data radically more accessible.

Nick Kaufmann & Greg Lindsay

Surface Tensions

[Surface Tensions] presents the results of a live threatcasting workshop in which participants built physical scenarios using 3D props, then captured them as augmented reality videos. The scenes on view imagine future threats to public space and the evolving role standards like DTPR might play in addressing them. An open-source library of 3D models is available for anyone to continue the work.

Jay Elias & Talia Winningham

(TAP)estry

(TAP)estry is a speculative fabric installation that comes alive through data. Woven together with nylon, felt, mesh, LEDs, and deconstructed cable materials, (TAP)estry offers an exploration into the data that is constantly extracted from our worlds. Installed as decor and connected to network infrastructure, this woven piece lives dormant when data is not flowing. As network traffic carries personal information, and various data (such as camera, device, and communication data), systems begin to light up and visualize the siphoning of information. Imagined as home decor, these systems offer a canvas to capture and realize the transfer of data that occurs as we move through our worlds.

Candice Walker

The Jersey City Equity Nexus (JCEN) App

The Jersey City Equity Nexus (JCEN) is an interactive digital platform designed to combat housing displacement by bridging the gap between complex municipal data and community action. Combining data visualization of rent-versus-income trends with a "Co-Design Wireframe Kit," the project empowers Jersey City residents to visualize neighborhood changes and access resources. JCEN transforms cold statistics into a community-led advocacy tool, fostering a collaborative approach to urban planning and ensuring that long-term residents have the agency to stay in their homes.

Yinyin Zhou

Unseen Stories: Inviting People to Notice

Unseen Stories is a series of physical and digital interactive installations in Strawberry Fields, Central Park. Visitors lift a vintage telephone to hear archival voices, look through a viewfinder to glimpse the site's layered past, and take home a wooden coaster that brings the stories back to life when scanned — a small object that lets the experience continue beyond the park. The project invites visitors to slow down and notice the unseen stories embedded in the places we pass through every day.