Using Augmented Reality to visualize signal strength data
You’re in your apartment complex and receive an important phone call from a company you’re interviewing for.
“Hello, this is Brian!” “Hello?” “Are you there? Hello….?”
A few seconds later — the call drops.
Frustrated — you realize this is what you’ll constantly have to deal with living in this apartment. It’s not until a few months of trial and error when you realize the little corner of your living room is the signal sweet spot.
This is definitely not the experience you’d want to have.
Neither does your end-customer.
What if you’re a data-scientist at a large telecom company struggling with viewing your signal strength data? Where do you even start with your copious amounts of “big data”?
Lucky for you — BadVR did all the work.
We recently gave a first public demo of our flagship AR data-visualization project, “SeeSignal” during AT&T and Magic Leap’s event. This demo allows users to visualize wifi, cell, and blue-tooth signals within an environment using augmented reality.
People tend to think of cell signal as a flat “coverage zone,” but strength varies depending on a number of factors — including elevation, surrounding electronics, building construction material, and more.
Viewing cell signal data multi-dimensionally helps to capture this complexity (and helps to avoid dead zones!). This allows for accurate real-time signal strength readings and a view of historical usage patterns in a multi-dimensional space.
It’s as simple as putting on a headset — literally.
And the best part? You’re not limited to just the signal strength in your room. Yes — you can easily see the cell signal in a room, but what about the signal in your neighborhood or at a city-scale?
Easily switch scale and view the signal data at a city level with a tabletop hologram.
Throughout the event, the Magic Leap team members were very helpful in guiding the team with platform-specific tips & tricks, helping us all get over the initial obstacles. This really inspired the team to continue building on MagicLeap headsets, both at the event and thereafter.”
Even so — there were many challenges when building the demo at a product perspective. For instance, the team initially had a difficult time figuring out a form of information display that was both intuitive and non-intrusive (ambient).
We decided on a simple interface that’s easily understood. Red, yellow, and green signal meshes that display a rough estimate of the signal strength — grabbing onto them shows an exact reading!
All in all — you might be wondering: how did we get involved in AT&T and Magic Leap’s event? What inspired us to create “SeeSignal?”
The story’s simple.
We heard about this event through a mutual friend’s acquaintance at both AT&T and Magic Leap. It sounded like an exciting opportunity, and since we were heading to San Francisco for company meetings anyway, the timing was perfect.
Brian Wong, our friend and newest team member, was interested in joining as well. With him on board, we all thought it would be a great adventure to embark upon together to build camaraderie (and of course — an incredible product).
But then… why did we decide to visualize signal strength data in AR?
Well, it all started with 6 years living in a concrete box of a condo in downtown LA. Suzanne Borders, CEO and Co-Founder of BadVR, shared her experience with excessive call drops and signal degradation.
There was no easy, organized pattern to find the best spot for cell signal. Without getting through calls reliably, it started to become a really big issue given that she was working as a contractor and needed to be available for work
“I ended up getting a wired phone line, but I thought: what if I could just ‘see’ the cell coverage within my space? That would make it a lot easier to know where to put my phone to catch incoming calls. From there, I also thought: what if I could view call drop data historically throughout a three dimensional space? This way I could look for patterns and correlations to stuff like time of day. Being able to see this data in real-time, in an existing space, will be a game changer.”
And it most definitely will be.
Why AR though? Aren’t you a VR company?
These events have always been a fun experience and a great way to bond with teammates and build relationships in a community. Our team wanted to get to know more people in the AR space and get inspired, so it was the perfect opportunity to be involved.
Even though BadVR’s core product presents data visualization in Virtual Reality — it’s important that we recognize the key differences between developing in AR vs VR. This was crucial when building the product demo for the event.
“ With AR, you have to factor in how the real world and real people can disrupt your holograms. Within AR — everything in the environment affects you. You have to design everything to be reactive to the dynamic world. Really good AR blends into the world and feels ubiquitous — like it was always meant to be there.” — Jad Meouchy, CTO and Co-Founder
VR on the other hand — it’s much more of a solitary experience, and it’s best suited towards visualizing abstract datasets that don’t necessarily tie into a specific environment — stuff like machine learning models, abstract financial models, etc.
The benefit to VR is that you can create an entirely new, endless world and fill it up with abstract data that can be communicated to the user in all sorts of unique and innovative ways.
You’re less constrained by your real-world surroundings, and organically fitting into them. VR allows you to go fully ‘somewhere else’ which is really helpful too for focus and task completion
“AR allows you to see the world around you, so it’s best suited for visualizing data that has a geo-spatial tie-in. Stuff like IoT sensor data, or cell signal data, or wifi. In terms of design, with AR — and MagicLeap in particular — you also have the ability to walk up, reach out, and touch your data.
This removes the need for complex controllers that are often required in VR. As such, you can build and design more organic products, things that invite the user to touch them, to interact with them. And, since the data is placed within the room, you can also organically shape the product to fit within the user’s space” — Suzanne Borders
Both AR & VR have their strengths and weaknesses; it’s really about finding the best fit for the dataset and use case!
After the event — we decided to share a snippet of our project through social media.
Videos of the SeeSignal AR data-viz demo went viral on Twitter with 15k+ plays and hundreds of engagements. CEO of Magic Leap, Rony Abovitz, shouted out BadVR and our SeeSignal project during his speech to the University of Miami.
So what does that mean as far as next steps? Well — the team is having a discussion around a potential roadmap for SeeSignal that involves WiFi planning and blue-tooth security scans.
There are conversations around releasing SeeSignal as an app for various immersive platforms.
Never again will anyone struggle with dead spots or subpar wifi. Get ready to expand your vision beyond the human spectrum — get ready to see the layers of the digital world around you.
‘SeeSignal’ is coming!
Interested in learning more?
Visit us at https://www.badvr.com / and request a demo. We’ll follow up to schedule a time with you to discuss further.
