Apps & Web Panel For Annotate Enterprise Locations By AR

A company with an unparalleled vision of how the future would look with the cutting edge mobile technologies. As an Augmented Reality Startup, the company provide data registry and lookup platform for augmented reality experiences to be deployed universally.

Client Requirement

Client was looking for a technology partner who could completely own the technical side of the system and help achieve the company’s vision. The idea was to provide an Augmented Reality platform where registered enterprises can annotate real world locations with 3D AR holograms.

To achieve this 3 components were necessary –

Web Panel to register and moderate enterprises and their locations.
App to annotate a location.
App to browse locations and try augmented reality experiences.

Annotation App Features

Login & Annotation

The login authenticates user for access to the associated enterprise and allow to choose any location to annotate with AR points & Hologram.

Browser App Features

Map

On accessing the app, user is presented with a map screen that displays near by places that have AR experiences.
User can select the registered place/building that he is in. The app then allows access to camera screen to explore AR holograms nearby.

Interaction and Indoor Navigation

When the user sees an AR hologram there is a possibility that he/she would be able to interact with it by tapping on the hologram.
Some holograms provide additional information such as discount offers in a mall or website redirection for information.
App also had a feature to be able to navigate within a building by leveraging an indoor AR navigation feature.
User simply selects a location within that building and the app shows the path in camera screen that user must follow to reach the destination.

Web Panel Features

Registration & Login

Any customer/enterprise has an option to register with the system and buy credits to be able to annotate different locations with 3D holograms.

Places

User can add as many distinct locations as he/she wants.
These locations would each have multiple points where AR holograms can be deployed.
A place can be any building or location that can be identified on a map.

AR Points

Each new point added into the system consumes credits and thus user must have sufficient credits before adding new experiences.
Any AR experience can be accessed in one of the multiple ways that system supports.
Contextual Awareness – When the user gets within close proximity i.e. within a specific distance from the registered point, the hologram gets accessible.
Map based Deployments – GPS locations are used for accessing holograms at a macro level.
Point Detection using Deep Learning – Leveraging native libraries to detect scanned objects and show 3D holograms.

Holograms

Holograms are nothing but 3D animating models that are deployed in real world and may or may not allow interactions.
Users can add as many holograms as they desire and associate each with a specific point.

Credits & Other Details

Credits are used to create AR points within the system.
User can purchase more credits for newer deployments as and when necessary.
Web Panel also had other options relating to user profile and settings.

Challenges

The scope threw so many challenges at every stage that it made us break our boundaries in terms of what could be achievable with existing technology stack.
Whether it was deploying dynamic Augmented Reality experiences or creating our own business logic for indoor navigation using AR, the project always kept us on our toes.
On studying the scope, we suggested to have a web panel and an iPhone app for the enterprise setup and a stand alone iPhone app for browsing the experiences.
With the advances in ARKit, we were able to leverage a lot of native framework features to build our scope.
The browser app was required to be absolutely loosely coupled. Thus, we created an SDK for it which can be embedded into any enterprise app to leverage the platform features in their own apps.