Augmented Reality & UPRN at the Stamford Georgian Festival

Written by Andy Hird who is the Managing Director for address management specialist Aligned Assets. This blog focuses on Augmented Reality & UPRN.

Following on from previous Augmented Reality blogs (Augmented Reality & the UPRN  and Enabling Augmented Reality in 5 minutes) I wanted to highlight some of the recent work we have been doing by using the UPRN and existing data held within an organisation.

Just over a month ago our Commercial Director (Dinesh Thanigasalam) had a conversation with South Kesteven District Council about using Augmented Reality for the upcoming Stamford Georgian Festival Given that the festival data was already available on the website we decided to render that data within our Symphony AR mobile application for use by the public.

There were 3 main technical areas of work that we needed to perform:

1. Format Event Sites as Venue Locations.
2. Format Event Data for display within the mobile application.
3. Modify the Symphony AR mobile application to render the information.

In my previous blogs I highlighted just how useful the UPRN could be when presenting data for use within Augmented Reality as it allows us to obtain the relevant location information such as the Easting & Northing (or latitude/longitude).  A UPRN is a Unique Property Reference Number and is part of the most comprehensive address dataset available in the UK known as AddressBase Premium and is curated by Ordnance Survey.

Format Event Venues as Location
To begin with then we had access to the following map

Reference: http://www.stamfordgeorgianfestival.co.uk/info/festival-map/

Working closely with South Kesteven’s LLPG and GIS Officer we created a csv file containing the locations, to which we added a UPRN.  Joining this dataset back to AddressBase Premium was simple (because of the UPRN) and this now meant we had access to an ‘address’ and more importantly the coordinates of the location.
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Format Event Data
The next step was more manual than we would normally expect but nonetheless a straightforward task.  The goal here was to obtain a list of all the events that were occurring throughout the Georgian Festival and tie them back to the Event Locations (via the UPRN). As you can see in the following table (showing just some of the fields we brought together) we collect a range of information relating to that event so that we can display that in the mobile application.
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Modify the Symphony AR Application
Our Symphony Location Manager application provides a nice and easy to use wizard to allow you to load a dataset (such as those we just created) into our database. This is the first step in allowing the Symphony AR Mobile application being able to read that data and display as points.  We then build a view (again using a wizard), that allows us to choose an icon to use as the Augmented Reality marker, and to format which data we want the user to be able to see when they click on a marker.

N.B. Some of the icon markers to be used as Augmented Reality markers within the application are shown below

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We needed one of our developers to get involved at this point as the Symphony AR application needed some modifications to make it more suitable for use by the public.  These included bypassing our security and authentication model (as all of this data was non-restrictive), removing application customisation options such as Mock Location and adverts and formatting the application to better visualise events which occurred each day throughout the duration of the festival.   This had the advantage of adding functionality to the core product so the next customer that wishes to use Symphony AR for an event like a festival, will have these available to them.

Putting it all together
At the time of writing this blog, we had just completed application testing across several different mobile phone handsets and released the final version of the application to the Google Play Store today.

Once you are in Stamford the application will:

• Show you the Event locations as Augmented Reality markers
  • Allow you to click on an augmented reality Marker to
  • Display the Event Venue Name
  • Display a description of the Venue
  • Present a link to the relevant Venue Web Page
  • Show the distance to venue from your location
• Switch to a map view to show that Venue on a map (alongside all other venues)
• Show date icons, allowing you to click on the date icon showing events on that date at this location
• Allow user to reduce the markers shown by category using Range or Filter
• Click on Radar to show all Event Venues
• Click on marker within the map to display Venue Name and a link through to the event’s website landing
• Allow you to use the Image Recognition Features to point the display to one of the pre-defined images which will allow you to bring up a web page

The Mobile application can be downloaded now from the Google Play Store under the name Georgian Festival , if you want to find out more on the Stamford Georgian festival augmented reality application please click here

As a final note should you wish to know more about how the solutions mentioned in this blog can help your organisation please do get in touch.