Augmented Reality Campus Navigation and Information Layer
A phone app that guides new students and visitors around a university campus by overlaying directions and building information on the live camera view, anchored accurately enough to trust. An AR final year project where measuring and reducing tracking drift is the core engineering work.
Intermediate
A small team, or one strong student willing to learn something new.2 semesters · 2 to 3 students
6 to ship
3 optional extrasSuggested stack
What you should ship
- Anchored points of interest that stay in place through device movement, occlusion and lowering and raising the phone
- Outdoor navigation that fuses satellite positioning or the Geospatial API with visual tracking, with drift measured along at least three fixed routes
- A campus graph of paths with walking and step-free edges, and route calculation between any two points
- An information layer for buildings and rooms (department, opening hours, rooms inside) editable through an admin panel
- An accessibility mode that routes on step-free paths only and a conventional 2D map view always available
- Field evaluation with at least 10 participants completing real navigation tasks, compared against a standard map app
If you have time left
- Indoor guidance in one building using printed visual markers where positioning fails
- Shared cloud anchors so several users see the same content in the same place
- Event mode for orientation week with temporary pins that expire
The problem: new students cannot find the room
On large campuses, new students and visitors spend their first weeks lost. A 2D map shows buildings but does not answer the questions people actually have: which of these two doors is the right entrance, which floor is the lab on, and is there a route without stairs? Orientation week guides help for a few days and then disappear.
Augmented reality can answer these directly by placing arrows and labels on the live camera view. It only works if the anchoring is accurate enough to trust. An arrow pointing through a wall is worse than no arrow.
What already exists and the gap
- Google Maps Live View overlays walking directions on the camera view in supported areas, using Google's Visual Positioning System.
- ARCore Geospatial API gives developers the same positioning where Street View coverage exists, plus Streetscape Geometry for nearby buildings.
- Navigine and Mapxus sell indoor navigation and AR wayfinding to malls, airports and large venues.
Live View knows public streets, not the path between the library and the CS block, and it does not know department names, lab hours or step-free routes. The indoor platforms are enterprise products priced for venue operators. Street View coverage is also uneven on many university campuses, including in Pakistan. The gap is a campus-owned layer: paths, entrances and information maintained by the university, with an honest measurement of how well AR positioning works on that campus.
What you build
- Student or visitor: searches for a building or room, gets a route, follows AR arrows outdoors and switches to a 2D map at any time.
- Accessibility user: turns on step-free routing.
- Campus admin: adds buildings, entrances, rooms, opening hours and path edges through a web panel.
The backend stores a path graph (nodes at junctions and entrances, edges with length and a step-free flag) and point-of-interest data in PostGIS. The app computes the route, converts it to anchors along the way, and shows short-glance guidance.
The technically interesting part
Drift. Visual tracking accumulates error as the user walks. After a hundred metres, a carefully placed arrow can point into a hedge. Satellite positioning corrects the drift outdoors but jumps by several metres, especially near tall buildings. The core work is:
- Measuring drift: walk fixed routes with surveyed checkpoints and log the difference between where the app thinks you are and the real checkpoint.
- Fusing sources: re-anchor to the Geospatial pose when its reported accuracy is good, otherwise trust visual tracking, and smooth the transition so arrows do not jump.
- Designing around what is left: place arrows at decision points (junctions, entrances) rather than continuously, so small error does not matter.
Show the drift plots before and after fusion. That chart is the result.
How to evaluate it
- Drift: mean and worst error at checkpoints on three routes, with and without fusion, in two lighting conditions.
- Field study: 10 or more participants, real tasks (find a room they have never visited), task success and time, compared against a standard map app.
- Usability: a SUS questionnaire and short interviews. Report honestly where the map was faster.
- Admin effort: time to add a new building with entrances and rooms.
Suggested plan
- Weeks 1 to 3: survey one campus area, build the path graph and checkpoints.
- Weeks 4 to 8: AR anchoring prototype, drift measurement tooling.
- Weeks 9 to 12: routing, fusion, admin panel.
- Weeks 13 to 16: information layer, accessibility mode, 2D fallback.
- Weeks 17 to 22: field study, second iteration.
- Weeks 23 to 26: final evaluation, report, demo on campus.
Path to a product
The first customer is your own university's admissions or student affairs office, which runs orientation every year. After that, the same product fits other campuses, hospitals and large exhibition venues. A realistic model is a per-campus annual licence with the admin panel included, plus paid setup for mapping. Keep the data format open so a customer is not locked in.
Scope warning
One outdoor area of campus plus at most one building interior. Do not build social features, chat or indoor positioning with Wi-Fi fingerprinting. Design for short glances: holding a phone up while walking is tiring and unsafe near traffic.
Learn what you need on Sefism
- Mobile roadmap : what you need to ship and test a mobile app on real devices.
- Unity Manual and Scripting API : AR Foundation runs inside Unity.
- Red Blob Games : graph search and A* for routing on the path graph.
- PostgreSQL Documentation : the database under PostGIS for campus geometry.
- Backend cheat sheet : APIs and data modelling for the admin panel and routes.
Get help with this idea
The key decision is how much of the campus to cover and how you will measure drift. Tauseef can help you narrow the area, choose between the Geospatial API and a marker-based approach, and design a field study your examiners will trust. If you are new here, create a free account first.
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