Telly Path

Inspiration

I drive a 2008 Civic. Wonderful car, but has no tech in it. My grandfather recently purchased a 2023 Corvette C8. It's got a quite interesting heads-up-display integrated into the windshield, and I was immediately interested in how to bring a similar experience to older vehicles

What it does

Our app uses Google Maps APIs, as well as a library that functions as a wrapper for Google's ARCore for Android Devices to display markers for turns using Augmented Reality to provide realistic distance simulations for our markers. Designed so you can mount a phone or tablet to the dash, and get the benefits of a heads-up-display

How we built it

It was written in Java and Kotlin in Android Studio. The UI for the AR was in Kotlin written with Jetpack Compose, while the back-end that interfaces with Maps APIs was just plain Java

Challenges we ran into

I've written in Kotlin once before, and my partner has used Android Studio a total of 0 times. We we quite unfamiliar with the software, so had to both learn a lot before even starting. Also, ARCore is more than a bit tricky to work with, which is why I eventually settled for a wrapper library.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We didn't think it would work. At all. It doesn't work well, but some parts do genuinely work, which kinda surprised us. We're proud that we did get it to somewhat work. We could render waypoints in AR with variable distances based on what was told to us by Google Maps' API

What we learned

We learned much more about using Android Studio, API's, and most painstakingly, using any Augmented Reality Libraries.

What's next for Telly Path

We'll try to improve marker placement based on maps data, as well as change the marker to arrows, as to indicate which direction turn is coming up, as well as include text-based distance markers

Built With

• android-studio
• java
• kotlin