SAM STRONG
SkyLine is an augmented reality app that offers a lens to see the future of your city. With geospatially located AR content, the app allows users to travel through time to explore proposed high rises at full scale, superimposed within the existing context.
The app was built as my submission to the AR Core Geospatial API Hackathon. The focus of the hackathon was to use the Geospatial API, which uses data from a mobile device's camera and compares it to Google Street View imagery. This gives developers the ability to place location-based augmented reality content with a high degree of precision.
Ultimately, I was chosen as a winner of the hackathon, coming in second place overall.
To get a better feel for what the app has to offer, I've included my final submission video. If you want to learn more, you can view the full submission on Devpost here.
When conceptualizing the app, I kept things relatively simple due to the time constraints of the hackathon, and my desire to make the end result as intuitive as possible.
I focused on three main features: a map, a timeline, and an augmented reality camera view. The idea was to pack these all into one screen, and allow the user to interact with them all simultaneously.
At the core of the UI is the timeline. This allows users to scrub back and forth through time based on each buildings expected completion date.
A map at the bottom of the screen compliments this feature by serving as a reference for each building's exact location.
By selecting buildings on the map, the corresponding building is highlighted in AR with a location marker, and additional information is provided.
Being awarded second place in the AR Core Geospatial API Hackathon has been huge validation for this app, and gives me confidence to continue work on it. Although only available in NYC at the moment, I'm considering expanding to other cities.
In the meantime, I'm doing some additional studies to confirm potential use cases and target audience. Right now, I think this could become an important tool for professionals like real estate developers, architects, and brokers as well as for tourism.
