#1 Tour.Go: Building the Prototype

Tour.Go is a augmented reality tourist app, for education and engagement in cultural and historical topics. This project is being developed for a Final Year Project as part of my BSc (Hons) Computer Games Development degree at the University of Westminster.

As part of the project, my aim is to develop an educational tourist app that will allow users to learn more about monuments they encounter in the real world. For a proof-of-concept approach, I will only be focusing on monuments found in central London.

Over the last month, I have been working on a proposal, outlining the main aspects of the project.

Project Proposal poster outlining the overall idea including aims, objectives, timeline and features.

This poster outlines my aims and objectives that I hope to achieve during this project. The augmented reality app will be focused on educating users about landmarks. The idea is that users will learn more using this app when touring a city or historically significant location. Rather than being a replacement to exploring, the goal is to enhance discovery and allow a better way to document and learn about what tourists find on their travels. The background review was essential to understand the possible features that could make it into the final version of the app. Although I am still defining the final features of the app, certain mechanics including a badge collection and levelling system is essential to delivering on the gamification aspects to ensure long-term user retainment.

A throwaway prototype used to test the idea for the main functionality of the app.

Note that, I have purposely disabled the camera background as travelling to a location was not possible. The positive side to this, is I was able to record next to my PC to demonstrate the usability of the app, and make necessary changes quickly.

The user moves towards a monument and hits the button in the centre lower part of the screen, and an 'experience' displays. Experiences may differ in number of types of objects as I experiment, but I will initially use a template to more easily make progress.

The objective of the prototype was not to create a visibly attractive prototype or demonstrate the user experience of the app. Instead, the prototype's aims was to understand how the Unity AR foundation package works and the capabilities. I also wanted to test how easy it was to display information or visuals that were clear to the user, and was surprised with how little difficulty I had displaying objects once I understood the correct scale. The prototype was also to demonstrate the feasibility of the concept, and work with spawning/scanning to display new objects in the virtual world. From this prototype, I can now move on to identifying the interface and user experience.

How this prototype works is considerably simple for now, but the final version will be much more complex. For this example, I have instantiated the waypoint in a pre-set location, and assigned the monument's data within the editor. One of the next steps will be to develop a system that can fetch monument data, including geo-location, waypoint collider radius and information, to allow for real-world monuments to be found by users. This approach of using a back-end solution will allow for scalability, and avoid the requirement of constantly updating the application for new content.

One major part of making real-world monuments available for identification using the app will be converting geo-location coordinates into unity coordinates. One method I have found that is capable of doing so is the haversine formula as seen below.

Haversine formula (2023) Wikipedia. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haversine_formula (Accessed: 02 November 2023).

The Haversine formula determines the distance between two points on a sphere. So I could use this formula to determine the distance and direction. The direction would be 0 to 180, where 0 points north and 90 points south. I need to do more research on this in the future, so may change my approach entirely, but this is one way I have considered achieving the comparison of two locations. These being, the device location and location of the given monument.

One feature that I want to expand on featured in this prototype is the 'virtual tour guide'. When considering how to captivate users in topics using traditionally 'game' aspects, I thought about traditional methods tourists use to engage with monuments. The idea of a virtual tour guide would be achieved using an animated 3D character mesh, and imitating the experience with a real tour guide. Users could ask questions regarding the monument via a dialogue menu, and the character would then reply with 'talking animations'. My final goal with this feature is to use text to speech for clearer communication.

The next stage will be expanding on progress made with the throwaway prototype and starting to gather feedback for feasibility and system features. The short-term objective is to create an app demo in the next month. In particular, creating an app-mock-up to demonstrate final functionality. Starting to integrate firebase SDKs into Unity for account authentication and fetching monument data will be a target I hope to complete by January. I will update this blog regularly to document my approach and project progress. I look forward to seeing what I am able to achieve in the next few months!