UA Campus Tour App

Banana Panic is a group of students at the University of Alabama formed with the intention of building a UA Campus Tour app for the Android smartphone platform.

In short, our application will be a guide for prospective students and their parents while they walk across campus. The app will also provide vistors with background information about landmarks and points of interest as they come across them on campus.

Importance

It is our experience that campus tours are of great importance in helping prospective students make informed decisions about where to matriculate, as well as strongly influencing the decisions of potential future staff members. While campus tours are available prospective students at regularly-scheduled intervals, we believe that the current system is too limiting. It leaves out students who cannot fit these tours into their schedules. It may also exclude staff members (who may be interested in tour-type information, but embarrased to attend a new-student tour).

Our app will also open the door to completely new discovery experiences. It will make it possible to have a tour-like experience from the comfort of one's own home. It will also feature a passive discovery mode, allowing vistors to walk around campus on their own route, while still providing interesting information as they approach points of interest. Finally, we expect to allow focused sub-tours in fine-grained areas that it would not be practical to have a dedicated tour guide for.

Goal Functionality

Our goal is to create an application that will guide visitors through a series of points-of-interest, allowing them to explor the campus as they go. In its primary mode, our app would display a map that would show a user both their current location and the direction of the next stop on their tour. Once they proceded far enough in the proper direction, a point would come into view on the map, allowing them to go to exactly the right place. They would then be presented some combination of text, images, and video that would inform them about the significance of the landmark. We also intend to offer spech-to-text functionality in order to facilitate the sharing of a single Android device among small to medium sized groups.

As secondary features, we hope to add some important abilities, which have already been touched on. First, we hope to implement a "discovery mode", which allows for a less guided experience. The interface would still display a map with the user's location, but the user would not be given a specific destination. Instead, all points-of-interest would be highlighted on the map. The user would be encouraged to explore campus by their own route and would have access to the information about any building that they approached. It would also support pulling up information about an arbitrary building that the user was not close to (to facilitate off-campus viewing). Second, we will implement a filtering system, which would allow a user to take a tour more suited to their specific areas of interest. For example, a prospective computer science student, may want to take the "CS tour".

If time allows, our intent is to develop our application into a general framework for that would allow any school to implement a similar app in a greatly reduced time-frame. In an ideal world, we would build a desktop application that could read a domain-specific langauge (or just xml) and a set of resource files and generate a compiled Android APK (application package). The specifics of this framework are still being fleshed out, so it could take a very different, much-reduced form.

Android Benefits

We think that the Android platform offers the ideal environment for our application due to the combination of its open-source, freely-available nature and its powerful APIs. We intend to use Android's location API extensively to determine when participants have reached trigger locations during their tour. giving information about a building as the user arrives at the location. We also plan to take advantage of Android's readily-available text-to-speech functionality to read information aloud for the user. Finally, our idea of using a desktop app to turn our code into a framework for other apps simply wouldn't work on other platforms, where "app factories" are firmly rejected.

If you've got any suggestions, please feel free to contact us