Where’s My Car
Overview
Ever walked out the supermarket and wondered where on earth you parked? We get it.
Introducing “Where’s my cAR?” .
As part of our research and development programme, we decided to make a real-world concept to show off some of the capabilities available using augmented reality.
Where’s my cAR detects when you stop driving and stores the location – but that’s not all. Bringing up the app will show you in AR (Augmented Reality) exactly where your car is with a handy marker. You can even split screen with a traditional map if you’d prefer.
Technical Challenges
As Augmented Reality technology is still in its infancy, ARCore (Androids AR engine) doesn’t have an easy way of representing location data in AR. So as part of this process, we developed the ARCore-Location library to help us (and any other Android developers) to create GPS location-based AR experiences. Luckily, iOS already has a wonderful library available from ProjectDent.
Another challenge is how to find out where somebody has parked their car. Whilst both platforms are able to tell us whether the user is walking, running, driving or standing – only Android allows you to do so whilst the app is not being used. Therefore in the Android version, we’re able to automatically detect when you’ve disembarked from a moving vehicle and set that as the location. At the time of writing, on the iOS version, this is something that can only be done manually.
Additionally, mobile locations services can be quite temperamental. The location updates being given to apps vary wildly in accuracy, meaning that sometimes it might think you’re several hundred metres away from where you really are. Mobile compasses are also only accurate to approximately 15 degrees, and that’s assuming your compass is properly calibrated and you’re not close to any electronics or large machinery! This can be problematic when trying to get an accurate bearing on your current position and the position of your car – giving some mixed results.
Download it and give it a try, we would love to have your feedback.
