Inspiration
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, travel has become severely limited and plans for summer vacations or small getaways vanished into thin air. To allow people to somewhat experience this travel, we aimed to create an app that would allow the user to be immersed into the environment of some destination.
What it does
The app is incomplete as we ran into significant obstacles with integrating some of the key components into the app. Nonetheless, the following is what we envisioned the app would be like.
The welcome screen allows the user to either sign in to an existing account or register for a new account. After signing in, the user is shown a page with lists of their past, ongoing, and planned virtual trips. Each virtual trip is essentially an AR-infused virtual walkthrough between various locations with panoramic views. The app would allow the user to pause a trip and stop wherever they would like to. If the location is near or at a significant landmark, the app would ask the user if they would like to hear more about that specific landmark. The explanatory audio would play if the user chooses so. These audios could either be from an elastic search (and subsequent text-to-speech) or from crowdsourced audios. We would also incorporate augmented reality to make the experience seem more realistic and immersive. The ultimate goal would be to make this a virtual reality application, but we did not have the required hardware to try this out.
This could also be of use for cab or public transportation services to offer their customers a glance into what a specific ride would be like.
How we built it
The plan was to use Flutter/Dart to build the app (so that it could be deployed to Android, iOS, and web) and integrate Google Maps, Google Street View, Google Places, geocoding, and augmented reality (from EchoAR or Google's ARCore) into the app to provide a neat, user-friendly interface that provided realistic tours.
Challenges we ran into
We ran into issues integrating a real-time 3-D panoramic view into our app (both Dynamic Street View images and view interpolations with static Street View images) and had some trouble with the AR APIs (both ARCore and EchoAR).
What we learned
We gained valuable experience with integrating several packages (such as the Google Maps/Directions/Places plugins and the AR plugins) into a Flutter environment. While we weren't able to get our app working as we intended, this experience was still very enjoyable and useful.
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