Summary: An Augmented Reality Navigation Concept App

Formation-I was a small startup I partnered with to provide UX support for an indoor/outdoor navigation app they wanted to develop. While the company took the demo to several investors, it sadly wasn't able to gain enough traction to stick. Still, my experience with AR design was fruitfull and allowed me to flex some long unused 3D muscles in addtion to my UX work.

For my role on the project, I designed the AR navigation experience as well as a companion app that would be used for creating "geo-location touch points". A business, let's say a restaurant, could add themselves to the database and provide special promotions or interaction points. When users/customers with the downloaded app moved past those points tracked by GPS the app would market a promotion or special message. The app itself gave users directions in real-time through the phone camera using AR (Google Tango) and would alert users when they arrived at their location and if there were any special "points or promotions" awarded.

Another use case for the project was to use beacon technology to create a navigateable and accurate picture of an indoor space. You may have noticed, google maps wasn't always (and still isn't) all that accurate indoors. Using beacon technology we explored the ability to create navigation in indoor spaces for a variety of purposes, for example in a large warehouse to navigate quickly, or a large supermarket for customers to search and find what they're looking for quickly.

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Project Outcomes

While I thoroughly enjoyed working on the project, the product itself wasn't able to gain enough traction to continue development efforts. However, all is far from lost for myself, as I came away with a strong understanding of augmented reality technology scope and limitations (for the time, things change so rapidly) as well as how UX works in that space.