Raiders of the Lost ARk

QR Code
UI
Character

Inspiration

Our motivation for this project stems from the fact that people are increasingly relying upon their smartphones to solve some of their common daily problems. One such problem that smartphones have not yet completely solved is indoor navigation. There is not a single low cost scalable mobile phone solution available in the market that successfully helps a user to navigate from one position to another indoors. An indoor navigation app would certainly benefit users who are unfamiliar with a place. Tourists, for instance, would have a better experience if they could navigate confidently inside a tourist attraction without any assistance. In places such as museums and art galleries, the application could be extended to plan for the most optimal or ‘popular’ routes. Such a system could also be integrated at airports to navigate passengers to their boarding gates.

What it does

We developed a hack which allows users to simply take out their phone, scan a QR Code, select the destination and navigate with the help of markers in augmented reality while following a 3D character. It’s easier to navigate indoors when you can see your surroundings rather than using maps. The project consists of four major parts, namely the ARCore based localisation, the QR-code repositioning, the navigation (NavMesh), and lastly the AR view. This project is developed for Android, but it is also possible for iOS.

Challenges we ran into

There was an issue with the version of Unity and ARCore. Due to this, our app was totally unresponsive and even after lots of debugs, we could not pinpoint the issue. We solved the problem by running the previous version of Unity and it worked. We encountered an android JDK path error while building the android apk file. Also we faced the issue that our application was working fine with high end mobile phones and lagging in low end mobile phones.