Abstract:

In this work, we present CARMA, our Campus Augmented Reality Mobile Application. As its name suggests, CARMA is a mobile application exploiting Augmented Reality (AR) to facilitate exploration and touring within a university campus. A university campus usually covers an extended geographical area where several buildings are located hosting academic departments, libraries, student residences, catering facilities and other services including conference halls, museums, infrastructures related to administration, culture, health or religion, etc. Despite the existence of maps and signs (when and where available), exploring and touring within a university campus is often a challenge for students (especially freshmen and Erasmus students) and visitors but also for members of the local academic and administrative community.

Motivated by these observations, which are based not only on experiences of friends and colleagues but also on our own personal experience, we designed and developed CARMA, an eco-friendly augmented reality mobile app for facilitating exploration and touring within the campus of our University of Patras. Once installing (for free) CARMA on their mobile device, users can just point the camera to any point of interest located within the campus and be instantly presented with descriptive information about it, including links to corresponding websites. Currently, CARMA includes all existing points of interest within the campus. However, authorized administrative personnel can easily update the details for existing points of interest or embed new points of interest.

CARMA is currently offered in English and Greek for Android or iOS devices. Its development has been mainly based on Unity and its AR Foundation package as well as C#. It is a lightweight and easy-to-use AR application. Moreover, CARMA can be easily adapted to any particular university campus and, thus, become a valuable e-assistant for freshmen, Erasmus students and campus visitors and a very useful app for current students, faculty members and administrative personnel of a university. In the bigger scheme, focusing on the education community, CARMA highlights how modern digital technology, including mobile devices, the Internet and cutting-edge software technologies, can be fruitfully exploited to enhance - in an environmental-friendly way – the real world we live in.

Keywords:

Augmented reality (AR) mobile app, exploration and touring, university campus, Unity, AR Foundation, C#.