rodelph/archivist

ARchivist is a software that allows the user to access hyperlinks that are printed on physical papers using Augmented Reality.

ARchivist

This project was made by :

First Name	Last Name	Student ID
Amine	Naqi	0562497
Mable	Rajan	0608648
Sean Victor	Scofield	0613347

Overview

This project contains the code for the ARchivist prototype built for the Next Generation User Interfaces course at VUB. It was written by Amine Naqi, Mable Rajan, and Sean Scofield.

ARchivist is a project that is meant to make hyperlinks visible and interactive on physical documents. In its current state, it can be used to create an "augmented" document from a website page (which generates a PDF of that website page containing a QR code and AR marker on each page). By scanning those QR codes, users of the ARchivist mobile application can them view and interact with a document's hyperlinks via augmented reality.

The code in this repo is separate into 2 sub-parts, each containing their own respective sub-directories and README files:

• ARchivist document generator: Python code to be run on a computer in order to generate augmented documents.
  • More info can be found here
• ARchivist mobile application: Unity project containing the code for an Android/iPhone mobile application that can be used to read and interact with these augmented documents.
  • More info can be found here

In addition, a pre-built Android APK of the mobile application has been included for ease of testing this prototype. Note, however, that the AR tracking performance is noticeably better on iPhone. For both Android and iPhone, the Unity project can be opened and used to package the application into an Android or iPhone app (the latter requiring MacOS).

Storage Solution

We are currently using JsonBin.io for storing the data that the QR codes in our augmented documents link to. We ultimately cut some corners in order to get a workable solution with minimal effort, that way we could focus on more important aspects of this project. We go into more detail in our final report, but some of the negative aspects of this current approach are that it is centralized and we also didn't address security of access.

We created a JsonBin.io account solely for use with this project, and have provided "read" and "write" access keys in plaintext to our mobile application code and document generation code, respectively. Furthermore, we list the username and password of that account here for ease of visibility into the stored files themselves as well as troubleshooting (this is normally a VERY BAD security flaw that should not be done):

JsonBin.io user: [email protected]

JsonBin.io pwd: tHEmEMERgANG1997

Compatibility

This project is meant to be compatible with the following operating systems (although macOS is required for building an iPhone app from the mobile application):

• Windows
• Linux
• macOS