About Radiate 

Radiate is an immersive social and event map application designed to connect people and cultivate serendipitous shared experiences. Radiate supports real-life connection with a next-gen AI map that brings together events, communities, friends, and new social circles. Radiate serves communities of nightlife enthusiasts, music festival-goers, and event attendees seeking genuine human connections. 

By turning digital tools into facilitators of real-life interactions, Radiate is applying technology to enhance human connection and combat loneliness. In an industry often focused on online engagement, Radiate stands out by bridging the gap between the virtual and the physical, making every interaction meaningful and every event unforgettable.

Engineering real-world serendipity

Radiate’s innovation lies in the ability to apply AI tools to create serendipitous moments at scale. Radiate faced the challenge of creating an environment where users could easily discover, connect, and engage with one another in real-world settings. To align key factors such as proximity, timing, and shared interests, the Radiate team needed a way to add real-time location awareness into their intelligent matching algorithms. And it would need to support a wide range of types of locations, from a massive music festival or concert venue to a casual local event. 

As the Radiate team began to add more and more ways for people to connect, they realized that there was an inherently spatial aspect to mapping events. They required a map service that would provide accurate and precise location data across diverse event settings and be capable of displaying a large amount of dynamic information. After evaluating various map providers, the Radiate team decided that the Mapbox Mobile Maps SDKs and their supporting platform and APIs were significantly better than competitors in terms of ease of development and scale-friendly pricing.

The visual appeal of the Mapbox Standard map style combined with the flexibility of the SDKs inspired the creativity of the Radiate development team. They started experimenting with Mapbox as the canvas to display all their data. Thrilled with the performance and visual appeal of the 3D landscape, the team decided to adapt their overall app design to position the map front and center.

At the same time, the Radiate team was inspired to use Mapbox GL JS maps to their internal, backend tools in order to enhance how they visualize their ever-growing datasets.

Mapbox Mobile Maps SDKs provide the foundation for a map-based application

Radiate's development team uses the Mapbox Mobile Maps SDKs for iOS and Android as the basis of Radiate’s core map-based experience. The Mapbox Mobile Maps SDKs and the Mapbox-created Turf.js library integrated seamlessly with Radiate's proprietary algorithms, providing robust and scalable architecture for Radiate’s synchronization of user data, venue and event mapping, and social proximity features. 

Interacting with the Mapbox SDKs via React Native, the Radiate team’s experience of building with Mapbox was smooth and efficient, reducing development time significantly. The Radiate team continues to give back to the community-maintained react native repository in Github, including the first iteration of iOS ModelLayer support and other experimental features from the core Mapbox SDKs.

Mapbox Standard brings the landscape to life, day and night

The Radiate team builds with the Mapbox Standard map style for a dynamic and visually stunning map design. On top of the Standard basemap, the Radiate app adds custom elements to encourage exploring and interaction with user-generated content. With the map interface as the primary experience of the Radiate app, the look and feel of the map style is integral to the user experience. Mapbox Standard provides a 3D basemap that the Radiate team can augment with their own 3d models, lighting, interactions, and animations. The dynamic lighting and nighttime ‘glow’ from buildings in the map style creates an appealing map experience, especially for nightlife events. Users can change and animate their lighting settings to customize their Radiate experience.

The built-in features of Mapbox Standard combined with the powerful map rendering capabilities of the Mapbox platform allow the Radiate team to push the boundaries of their user experience. The result is an engaging, immersive application with map-based interactions that feel fresh and unique to their app. The Radiate interface can simultaneously display thousands of plans, people, events, venues, and more, all unclustered and individually interactable. Dynamically generated 3D models for each venue extend into the vertical space of the map view, with avatars slowly rotating around the model and connected with thin lines. The addition of floodlighting effects indicate the density of people at each venue.

A fresh map-based experience grows user engagement by 300%

The integration of Mapbox technology has driven key metrics for Radiate, including a 300% increase in user engagement and a doubling of new connections made per quarter. Users report higher satisfaction due to improved event discovery and planning features and enhanced real-time location awareness. Building with Mapbox has allowed Radiate to overcome previous technical limitations and build a unique approach to a map-based social app that enhances user satisfaction and engagement.

With Mapbox providing a reliable and flexible foundation upon which to grow, Radiate has already created over 25 million user-to-user connections and has partnered with top companies like Live Nation. Radiate’s 3D map is driving a new phase of growth for the company as Radiate’s development team continues to explore ways to apply Mapbox tools for even deeper location-based features and personalization.