AccessAR

Future ideas
Initial design & ideas
Early development of cloud recognition

Inspiration

We wanted to make accessibility more accessible. We felt that students should be guided around campus more easily, through the use of their smartphones.

What it does

The app overlays information about the buildings and rooms located at the University of Bath Campus using augmented reality, for example whether the building/room is wheelchair accessible, has a lift, has gender-neutral toilets, has hearing loops etc. The app overlays this information whenever it detects the name of the building/room. For instance, for the room 1W 2.102 it will show information about the room type, capacity, hearing loop and wheelchair accessibility.

How we built it

At the beginning, we brainstormed ideas and concluded on the topic of accessibility around our university's campus.
We went around the campus and took pictures of some location labels (1 West, Fresh, Library etc).
We then got familiar with Unity and Vuforia, and spent quite some time installing the required packages.
At first, we implemented cloud recognition, then realized that this would not support multiple target images, so we switched to image recognition using a database of images created in Vuforia. We exported the project for an Android smartphone, as well as used Xcode to implement it on an Iphone.

Challenges we ran into

Getting familiar with Unity and Xcode
Initially, we tried using cloud recognition, but multiple image targets were not supported
Text recognition in Vuforia was a deprecated feature
Loading & installation time of Unity
Adjusting the augmented text, which was initially too large