Team Name
Looking Glass
Timeline
Spring 2021 – Summer 2021
Students
- Alexander West
- Michael Aiyedun
- Suman Poudel
- Matthew Speer
Abstract
Looking Glass is an Android-based application designed to aid and augment museum exhibits. The application is designed to allow easy adjustment to exhibits by use of code scanning. Information displayed in customized QR codes allow the application to present an enriched viewing experience with additional text and video that users can experience on their personal phones or tablets.
Background
Beautiful art comes with great history and unfortunately in the physical space of a museum it can be difficult to relay the storied past. In the age of information, people often desire to know as much as they can by obtaining details as easily as possible and Looking Glass aims to give them all the information they could desire. The application offers a more interactive experience, supplementing the purely visual standpoint with text and audio.
This project is designed to enhance the museum experience while allowing the museum the capability to adjust the amount of content they wish to offer by simply adding or removing scannable QR codes near their displays. It offers a seamless process that seeks to lengthen and augment the visit without being confined to the physical boundaries of the museum itself.
Project Requirements
The system shall be able to access the camera.
The application shall be able to run on Android devices.
The system shall be able to scan QR codes correctly.
The system shall be able to correctly match code to exhibit.
Users shall be able to view both text and video for each exhibit.
The application shall have an intuitive interface with clearly defined interactive features.
The system shall record a user’s history and allow them to view previously seen exhibits.
The system shall recognize when a QR code is not part of the exhibit and alert the user.
The application shall not transition between scanning a code and displaying exhibit info quickly.
The system shall allow for myriad of exhibits stored.
System Overview
Looking Glass is divided into four primary layers. The application layer serves as the core unit that handles all the incoming and outgoing data from other layers. The interface layer deals with all the user input and all encapsulated data and visuals to manage the user experience. The camera layer is an interactive layer that determines what the user wishes to view and what data requests are incoming. The data layer stores the necessary content for exhibits to archive and be retrieved for the user upon requests received from the application layer.
Demo
Demo Video (link)
Future Work
Due to time and budget constraints the project was severely altered from its original vision of operating on Google Glass with a server-based database. For future work, it is considered the potential to either further enhance the capabilities on android systems and extend to potentially iOS as well or to revert back to the smart glasses hardware.
In addition, the usage of an external database to store the exhibit data is a critical addition to ensure the validity of the software as a usable application.
Project Files
Project Charter (link)
System Requirements Specification (link)
Architectural Design Specification (link)
Detailed Design Specification (link)
Poster (link)
GitHub Repository (link)
Note: For purposes of the class, the “old” branch is intended to be the official finalized product.
