By David Bjorkgren

Published: 12:47 pm

Image via Penn State Abin gton.

Students from Penn State Abington’s CMPSC 487 software design course walk the campus to help them design a navigation app.

A team of Penn State Abington computer science students developed an augmented reality mobile app that guides students and employees across campus.

The project was part of a software engineering and design course offered at Penn State Abington in which students develop software for real-world clients.

The app combines outdoor GPS navigation with QR codes and image recognition to help users as they navigate the campus outdoors and inside buildings.

Walking the Campus

“I spent my time walking around campus going to every single classroom and hallway getting all the different coordinates and stuff like that,” said computer science major Sajed Khan.

An augmented reality system adds digital information to a live view of the physical world, usually through a smartphone camera or wearable display.

In this project, the app could overlay directions and waypoints onto a user’s view of the Penn State Abington campus.

Indoor/Outdoor Navigation

GPS would help determine the user’s outdoor location, while QR codes and recognizable images would help the system locate and guide the user indoors, where GPS is often unreliable.

“Being able to transition from outdoor to indoor navigation was the hardest part. The problem is outdoor GPS is very finicky with the indoor building navigation,” said computer science major Earl Hibbs.

In addition to walking the campus, the designers sought out the opinions of other students and talked about the concerns raised over navigating the campus.

The students fixed bugs in the code and made sure everything worked the way it is supposed to. The experience gave the students a good grasp of machine learning, particularly for image recognition.

Student Nicholas Shvelidze said the knowledge gained from the project will hopefully give him the ability “to use this for other mobile applications that would require image recognition software.”

The project also emphasized the importance of teamwork and collaboration.

“You’re going to need to look at other people’s work and then work off of it. You need to be able to communicate that thoroughly with other people,” said computer science major Anatoly Barabanov.