ARET (AR Environment Tagger)

Environment Tagging Demo 1
Environment Tagging Demo 2
Environment Tagging Demo 3
Environment Tagging Demo 4

Inspiration

Have you ever been in a large area like a hospital or shopping mall, and wondered where everything is? Or have you been in an event like a hackathon or career fair, and thought that it may be perfect if you could see all the company booths right in front of your eyes rather than struggling with reading a map? With AR Environment Tagger (ARET), you can easily address all these concerns! Just pick up your device, look at the event and load, and see all the tags for nearby rooms and events.

What it does

ARET is easy to use for both event organizers and participants.

For an event organizer, all they need to do is walk around, look at their surroundings through the camera on ARET and place tags on points of interest by tapping the screen. These tags will then be saved to our database, and become accessible to event participants.

The event organizer’s work then benefits participants when they arrive, as they scan the front door of the event and immediately see what interesting things are happening and where. Through the use of AR technology, ARET will increase the efficiency of events of all scales from the Olympics to a Friday-night party! It can greatly increase the efficiency in large scale events, and in small scale events minimize the frustration of explaining where the restroom is to everyone as a host to a party.

How I built it

ARET uses Augmented Reality and Computer Vision. All the programming is done in Swift 4.2 through XCode, and we used ARKit 2 and SceneKit to record and display location-based tags. For storing our tags, we used Firebase. For version control, we used Git.

Challenges I ran into

Putting a 3D object in the AR view is easy, but figuring out how to record, save and restore the locations of the objects is challenging. Adapting the 3D event tags to the users’ current view is another challenge.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

All of our team are first time programmers in Swift and AR, so we had to learn a lot on syntax, event-driven programming, asynchronous calls, and the ARKit framework. We made it through and built an AR app from the ground-up in one day.