AfRo- Augmented FRO

Being members of an undergrad research lab that focuses on HCI and XR in particular, we've always tried to come up with exciting solutions that could leverage these new mediums of information to solve some of the problems society is facing. Moreover, having witnessed the success of Pokemon GO and AR features in Snapchat and Facebook we realized that AR has a huge marketing potential, which motivated us to create this application

The app has an AR game as it's core and it's target users are children, the game allows the user to shoot and terminate the mosquitoes in the AR environment. The game also provides certain visual cues and triggers to make the user feel protected subconsciously. Beyond this, we've built in features like location-based notifications which request the user to use the product while they are in a mosquito-prone environment. The user also receives notifications on a fixed schedule, around timeframes wherein mosquitoes might be active to help establish a ritual and to keep them safe. The application also includes components that induce awareness about the various disease-carrying mosquitoes, this could, in turn, create more awareness about the product as a whole. The points gained in the game could be redeemed for coupons and offers and the game also receives new levels and power-up as the user buys FROs and registers a unique code related to that product eg: barcode.

The application was built completely in Unity and scripting was done in C#, we also used google maps api to provide location-based notification. Twilio was used to send SMS with OTP to ensure parental control over the child's experience.

One of the main challenges that we faced was the AR sdk to use, the best sdks had limited supported devices and might bring in scalability issues if used. We also struggled to integrate Unity with third-party services and API, since Unity is a game engine.

We're quite happy with the way the game turned out and the way we managed our time building the application.

Building AfRo was an exciting experience, we got to work on different apis and push Unity to it's limit. Oh! and we also learned mosquitoes.

We would like to further polish the game experience and make it more dynamic with a variety of bosses and levels. We also plan to build on the location-based filtering of mosquito-prone areas to generate better results.