MU Explore is an AR navigation application which is able to help the freshmen college students find their direction when they first come to their campus. When the students get lost on the campus. They can open the AR camera of the application to look around and the virtual information tab for the surrounding building will show up. And each information tab is interactive, the students are allowed to tapp on the tab to get further information about the building, such as the year of built, the major and the facilities inside the building. Different from the traditional navigation application. With the AR feature, MU Explore can not only provide the students direction when they are lost, but also help them find the resource they want, in order to encourage them to explore the campus as much as possible.
I I start with interviews of the international freshmen and local American freshmen to find out what kind of activities they do when they first arrive at the campus, as well as what prevent them from taking exploration.The result reveals that international students get more troubles when they first come to the campus. The rate of staying residence hall among international students is incredibly high compare to local students. What's more, the common issue is freshmen are basically not familiar towards the campus, and their exploration needs a destination or general direction, but they feel difficult to find out a direction, which prevents them from taking exploration on campus.
The research indicates that even the well developed and precise navigation app is not work well for the freshman to explore their campus only 20% of freshman use it to navigate. I think that is because the navigation on the market like google map is navigation from point to point.
To better solve the problem, I should make a new navigation application that is not from point to point. Instead, it should be able to suggest several place to explore and make the users know what are the buildings surrounding them and what they can find in these buildings. So that they can find their destination to explore. This feature remind me thing about the new technology Augmented Reality. I can us AR to deploy the virtual tab around each building to tell users information about each building.
