Augmented Reality Navigation App Senior Project Ideas.

My Senior Project group has decided to switch gears and choose to do an Augmented Reality Navigation application. I use my phone all the time for Google Maps.I know that it would have been great to have a navigation app when we traveled Europe, something that pointed out
Points of Interest, showed me where food is, and told me info about certain landmarks. Our instructor told us that AR is the future of development.
While I'm sure this is true, the market for AR apps is also saturated. We're confident that we can improve upon what already exists. Many of the iPhone apps we found are too busy, with too much text all over the screen. We spend about an hour talking about different possible uses for AR, everything from education, navigation, and entertainment. A major limitation is that looking at the world through your phone is non-intuitive by nature. An idea was to create an app that would help a mechanic take apart an engine. Certain parts of that he needed to work on would be highlighted, it would show him how to do the repair step by step. The major problem is that nobody wants to be holding their phone while repairing their engine. Perhaps when Google Glass and similar tech gets bigger, the AR market will expand. Imagine Tony Stark having to hold a phone to control his suit.

Here's some of the existing AR navigation apps I discovered:

Similar Ideas

1. Geo Travel

1. Specialized specifically for travelling and finding Points of Interest (POI).

b. Other apps are opened to display info, like Wikipedia.

c. You can choose POI before your trip, and only display those so that your screen is less cluttered.

2. Wikitude,

• a bunch of open source tools to do a lot of the heavy lifting
• Android and Apple integration.
• Extensive how-to documentation, code examples.
• Used by Adobe, Sony, LG and Samsung

3. Localscope

• Augmented Reality, but the overhead map view is more impressive. It filters the map based on a search query, and then filters your results further using Google, 4 square, yelp, etc…

Search for tacos with google and bing.

Display all of your places in Augmented Reality, show address, phone and distance. Integrates with 60 navigation apps.

• Integrates with a bunch of APIs. We don’t have to integrate with all of them

Google, Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter, iOS Reminders, Instagram, Panoramio, Flickr, YouTube, Wikimapia, Wikipedia, Factual, Citysearch, Yelp, 2GIS, Zomato, Baidu, Dianping, Yellow Pages Australia, ParkMe

4. Cyclopedia

Simple app that shows an overhead view of POI. In augmented reality mode, it displays arrows above head where the places are, and below it displays tabs, where if you click on one, the Wikipedia page opens open.

5. Robot Vision

Notable mention. Talks greatly about AR. Uses Bing.

Great article.