Augmented Reality APP

I built this augmented reality (AR) mobile project as my graduation project. I co-authored and published a paper for this project titled Campus Event App - New Exploration for Mobile Augmented Reality in The Journal of Issues in Informing Science and Information Technology (Volume 11, 2014). Now it's an official Bowling Green State University (BGSU) App used by university students. Building this project was a fun and exciting journey for me.

Without further ado, let's talk about the story behind the idea and explore some exciting product design and technical architecture design details. Are you ready?

Idea generation

After I chose augmented reality as the new technology that I would love to explore and locked down the scope of the graduation project with my graduation advisor, I started brainstorming sessions. While I was walking, driving, and studying every day, I was innovating ideas about augmented reality mobile applications in my brain. One day, when I saw a bunch of free pizza left out in the classroom in Hayes hall, I asked myself, can I help my fellow students find more free pizza using augmented reality? I then further expanded this question: can I help students find the best events happening on campus using augmented reality? An idea was born - An augmented reality mobile app that can help students find great events around campus through a fun and exciting experience. The rest is history.

Idea Validation & Competitive Analysis

Due to the limitation of resources, I cut the scope of market validation and product-market fit research. I only did customer qualitative research by talking to classmates regarding the viability of the product and how likely they would like to use it. The feedback was positive.

During the research, I found a competitor for this idea. The biggest competitor for this idea is the campus event page on BGSU's website. I analyzed its pros and cons a compared it with my idea and selected the features that I would love to have on my mobile APP which will bring competitive advantages for the App I was about to build. For example, a campus event page has a long list of events on the website, it's hard to navigate through all of them on your phone and it's hard to find out where are the events. Yes, you can always click through all the detail pages to eventually find that one line of the address. The whole process is just too cumbersome. My AR mobile APP on the other hand tackles all those problems in one shot. Campus Event AR mobile APP can help students find events in real-time based on their locations and navigate them to the events in just one click. How does the app do it? I will explain more regarding product design in the next section.

Product Design

The greatest selling point for my APP is that its location-based event finding AR APP integrated with Google map navigation. It takes full advantage of Augmented reality technology. It's simple and lean. I wanted to build a minimum viable product ( MVP) in such a way that it cuts to the point and provides the most important features for users with the simplest design and it's easy to use.

Product flow:

1. Launch the APP on your phone.

2. The camera will be opened automatically and you will see all the bubbles on the screen. Those bubbles are events near you. Every bubble has an event name associated with it. As you move your phone and point your camera to different directions, other bubbles(events) on other directions show up on your phone.

3. You can choose one event which interests you the most and clicks the bubble of the event, it will open the event detail page.

4. After you read the event detail and you decide to go to the event, you can click the map button on that page. Google map will navigate you to the event.

Done! After the simple 4 steps, you will be at your favorite campus event and taste the best free pizza on campus!

Technical Design

The major tech stack I used for the project includes Android SDK, Metaio SDK (AR product), Google Geocoding. The most important piece of tech design which contributes to the success of this project is event data flow. Where did I get all those campus event data? My competitor! This is the best "marriage" for my product to the competitor's product. My graduation advisor and I have a really good relationship with the information system (IS) department of BGSU who owns the BGSU website including the campus event page. We talked to them and got all the support we need to finish the project. Thanks, you all!

The data flow process is really simple. As you can see from the diagram above, this is a simple client-server architecture. There is a CRON job running in the App server and pulling the latest event data from the University Calendar Server every couple of minutes. The Campus event App pulls data back from App Server when it's launched. If you want to know more about technical design, please check out the paper - Campus Event App - New Exploration for Mobile Augmented Reality. I didn't sleep for a couple of days to revise it. Finally, with my advisor's help, we published it!

If you want to learn more about it, let's catch up! Send me a message here or shoot me an email at [e-mail]