London based app developers set out to launch social app

Loneliness and isolation have reached unprecedented heights within the last 15 years since the UK boom into the digital age. The UK’s capital London is now being commonly dubbed as the loneliest city.

Despite having everything at their fingertips, ‘Digital Natives’ are still feeling isolated. Research by the Eden Project found that ‘Digital Natives’ are now the loneliest age group in the UK, London is now the loneliest city. It is clear that this is a modern problem that requires a modern solution.

The supercomputers we carry in our pockets should have a new purpose, that isn’t isolating us further.

The co-founders Noah Heathcote and Indigo Howard drew from their own experience with loneliness to develop a new IRL (In Real Time) social app called Tora (tora means ‘now’ in greek), that plans to revolutionise how people interact socially with an “immersive experience” approach to socialising.

Due to be launched in the Summer, Tora talks the language of the digital generation with social interaction plus walking & game-driven activities so users can reconnect to the community and each other. One of the catalysts for this futurist concept started during the lockdown when theatre student Noah had to experiment with new ways of making theatre at home by himself.

“One of the only things we could do during the lockdown was walk, and so I became an avid wanderer, walking from place to place. I was also inspired by radical walker Phil Smith and ended up writing my dissertation on how walking could be used as a powerful tool to create digitally driven immersive experiences that allow us to reconnect with ourselves and the city” – Says Noah.

Indigo, who moved to London during the pandemic explained “I moved to a new city, and it became very obvious, very quickly, that socialising had become much harder post pandemic and the feeling of isolation hit me like a brick. I wondered, how is it possible that the most populated city in the country, is also the most isolated?”

The duo soon realised they had discovered a sobering reality within the city and strived to develop a ground-breaking solution to the rising loneliness epidemic.

“Instead of being “Online” it’s time to go “Onlive,” Indigo added. OnLive is Tora’s tool that is pivoting ‘Online’ and inviting people to socialise outdoors and in the moment instead of inside through screens at home. It offers a way for us to start a new connection revolution.

The app matches the user together in real life via a new way of utilising geo-location technology. Players have the choice to meet someone new or play with a friend. Then they go to the game start location and from there, they receive a sequence of activities that invites them to explore the city together.

For the trial, they invited participants from The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and one of the users described their experience “It was like a healthy PokemonGO” and “I felt like a tourist in my own city”.

The app comes at an exciting time as Experienced based socialising has been all the talk in the last couple years, however the current issue with a lot of these immersive experiences is that they cost £££ and are usually limited to a specific location. Tora is releasing later this summer but is still looking for people to trial the experience, get in touch now to be a part of the future of socialising.

By Mark Adair – Correspondent, Bdaily