AR Navigator

AR Navigator
Starting screen
Starting screen
Turn left navigation

Inspiration

Walking directions have generally forced people to have their heads down on their phones, stressed over finding directions, and unable to enjoy the present. When you're traveling, this can be especially frustrating when you're in a new city with a whole different system trying to walk from point A to point B.

What it does

AR Navigator displays turn-by-turn navigational instructions through the use of AR. We visualize the text of the instructions in real time as you walk towards your destination. Your phone acts as a camera portal to the world, and augmented reality directions are displayed as you walk, while you're still able to see the surrounding sights. We wanted to display attractions, restaurants, and reviews of these places as you're walking by as we could envision this being a really great plus to highlighting your surroundings.

How we built it

We used Swift and Apple's ARKit to create an iOS app!

Challenges we ran into

We had to figure out how to visualize navigational instructions in real space and real time. There were unfortunately lots of poor documentation, especially on ARKit since it's such a new technology. Swift also had some spicy errors that made us sad for more than a few hours.

We also realized some of the limitations of using Location Services, as it doesn't have an accurate granularity.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're super happy about how much we learned about Swift, iOS, and AR through this process! Neither of us have had any experience with any of these technologies, and we wanted to have an excuse to explore them. We're really proud we have a working prototype.

What's next for AR Navigator

This is a proof of concept on the possibilities of future AR. We can imagine extending this app to display attractions, restaurants, and reviews of these places as you're walking by. We also think incorporating camera picture taking functionality in the app would help people multitask finding directions and sightseeing!