Mary Ganesan and Lora Strother Campus Tours Using a Mobile Device

Problem University campus tours serve thousands of students each year. Essential in recruiting new students and promoting the university. Currently use traditional tours and virtual tours but these have restrictions. Students like to explore the university by themselves. Many students have smart phones. Can utilize technology to provide mobile campus tours.

Objective To design the software architecture and then implement a mobile application that would assist students taking self- guided tours of the university. The functionality would include: – GPS tracking – Campus tours – Map displaying points of interest – Social networking information (e.g. Twitter) – Events calendar Should provide intuitive and easy navigation.

Design Considerations Native vs Mobile web Interfacing disparate technologies Target device Resource constraints Multiple platforms Network communication User interface design Performance Memory management Security

Design Considerations Separation of concerns Single responsibility principle Caching – Reduces the number of connections to the database. Use of layers to separate functionality – UI, Business logic, Data access – Control access between layers User experience – Consistent navigation experience – Each page focuses on specific task

Architecture Location Information Server GPS Compass Bing Maps Database Management Service Twitter Extraction and Analysis Tweet Storage Location Storage Mobile Device JSON Tweets GPS Coordinates Location data Parsed Tweets Diagram shows the interaction between components.

Architecture Application architecture uses client-server modeled. – One or more mobile devices request information from server device. Architecture divided into layers: – Handles user interface Client side – Manages the logic Server side – Communicates with the database Server side Mobile device is a fat client.

Implementation Implemented in C#. Utilizes native Windows Phone, Bing and Silverlight frameworks. Code to extract tweets from the Twitter service is implemented in Java. Utilizes the Twitter API. Tweets are contained in JSON objects. Data is stored in a relational MySQL database. Challenges – Incomplete API – Battery drain due to always on GPS

Demo

Future Work Use Twitter as a rating system for locations and be able to pull user sentiments out of tweets. Incorporate other social networking sources (e.g. Flickr, Foursquare). Display location information about other facilities such as restaurants, bookstores, statues and must see places. Implement an augmented reality feature. Allow users to create profiles which would be used to suggest locations of interests. More focus on security. Expansion of the system onto other campuses.

Conclusion Location-based apps can have a real effect on education at the university level. Beneficial in engaging students who are new to the campus. The application helps students who are new to a campus and who want to explore the area without a human tour guide.

Questions?