Augmented reality helping you to meet your friends

Two weeks ago I had a course of Multimodal Perception at USI Program. During that course my group had the opportunity to develop the concept of a mobile application that would help people find their friends. In the video above you can have a brief presentation of our concept. Initially called Friend Finder, the application would be able to show you the way to find your friends. In this aspect, the Friend Finder is very similar to Google Latitude, using GPS and maps to show where you are and how to reach your destination. Furthermore, our concept makes use of Augmented reality to enrich the reality in such a way that makes it more meaningful and supportive in order to accomplish people’s end goal. In this case, Augmented reality would allow users see through the camera of their mobile phone where the target friend would be.

Probably you have already been in the situation where you know your friend is around you, but you can’t find him. Then, what do you do? You call him and then suddenly you see yourselves talking to each other just a few meters away, right? Instead of that, Friend Finder also gives you thermal feedback about the location of your friend. This way, if your friend gets closer your mobile phone becomes warmer. On the other hand, it would become colder if you are going away from your friend.

This course was a great opportunity we had to exercise our creativity in a realistic way. During the 2 weeks for course, we had a focus group where you showed our concept. The idea was very well accepted by potential users of such application. Furthermore it was very exciting to get in closer contact with Augmented reality. I look forward to work with that again.