Web application for community driven DIY augmented reality platform

Abstract

Users has been dependent on the world-wide web to find self-repair guide of a product, setup of a product or even on how to fold clothes in the fastest way. The guides can come in video or text format, one of the popular website which provide video is Google YouTube. Whereas Autodesk Instructables website provides guides in text format together with photos or images. These website guides depend on users to upload and they are known as crowd sourcing websites. However, often the obtained guides are not easy to understand or even incomplete thus eventually leading to the user frustrated and not able to accomplish the product. With the increasing popularity and advancement of augmented reality technology, more possibilities are opened for new ideas. Smartphone processing power has increase and this has led to augmented reality reaching into the palms of a user. A such example of a smartphone game which harness augmented reality is Pokemon Go. Pokemon Go is successful in deploying the augmented reality aspect and this shows that users are more willing to accept the technology. The aim of this project, fixIT, is to combine augmented reality and crowd sourcing contents to enable users to have a pleasant experience in following guides. The fixIT platform comes in two parts, first part is the website to allow users to create their own guides, the second part is the augmented reality Android application which will allow the user to view the user created guides with graphical instruction overlays. The android application was done by my project partner, Don Ho Jun Le. fixIT wants to encourage users to share their own ways of DIY by creating and sharing the guides on the website so that the community can benefit from it. Guides printed on paper should eventually become non-existent, every guide should be digitalized so that more trees can be saved for the next generation.