ARPlace

Inspiration

Many of us love virtual reality (VR), and want such an experience, but it's inaccessible to many people due to the hardware requirements. Google solved that problem for consumers and developers by making Google Cardboard. But introducing augmented reality (AR) to the masses is a challenge because of even more hardware requirements. Our hope was to bring a AR heads-up display to the masses with our project.

What it does

When you point your phone at a store, restaurant, or other building, ARPlace takes your current location and bearing, to check where you're facing and your proximity to an establishment, and then uses that info with Google Places to scrape information such as the name, how expensive the place is, the type of establishment, and the overall rating from reviewers.

How we built it

We first started out with trying to use optical character recognition read the establishment's sign, but that proved to be a challenge due to stylized fonts on many signs. So we pivoted to using location based services to find out which establishment your phone is pointing at, and scraping data via that.

Challenges we ran into

Optical character recognition is hard to do on stylized text. Another challenge we faced was using the compass to find the bearing of the user in relation to surrounding buildings. Due to inaccuracies with the phone's compasses, we had to alter our algorithm a few times to make sure it was accurate.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting the compass algorithm fairly accurate.

What we learned

Compasses on mobile phones are annoying.

What's next for ARPlace

Ideally, this would be implemented in taxicabs, with the information of places overlayed on the places themselves so that tourists and other visitors can find out what's available. Businesses could pay for ads to show off their business more.