Introducing Lucy: Organize Your House With AR
The Queen’s Technology Media Association provides students access to Canada’s first undergraduate product management program, giving students the opportunity to develop software applications throughout the year to serve today’s market needs.
What is Lucy?
Lucy is an immersive mobile augmented-reality (AR) application that takes the friction out of remote housing organization. From the initial interaction with prospective properties down to the planning of your furniture, Lucy simplifies your housing experience by allowing for a frictionless and creative experience. Lucy facilitates in-app requests and interactions with prospective renters, and empowers creative forethought with features that identify spatial parameters and furniture, rendering them into virtual reality and allowing for in-app notation to plan for a better home. We sat down with Tina Hai, the Product Manager, so we could learn more about the project.
Why did you want to create Lucy?
We all had a passion for augmented reality and wanted to create an innovative solution for a problem in an unsaturated market. We’ve all relocated for a job, participated in exchange programs and/or traveled and found that the process to find long-term housing is often unreliable and uncertain. With Lucy, users no longer have to go through multiple applications and strenuous messages on Facebook or email to secure long-term housing.
That’s so cool! Who’s it for?
Everyday consumers. After having just signed her first full-time job contract Annabel is looking for housing for her employment period in Spain while being based in New York, New York. While she has been messaging different users on Facebook via housing groups, she finds that requesting photos or information can be filled with awkwardness and doesn’t allow for accountability. Annabel is struggling with finding a property that fits her needs and facilitating a reliable creative organizing process that allows for her to plan for things such as furniture remotely. That’s where Lucy can help.
While the application is tailored for public-facing consumer use, Lucy allows for the opportunity to pursue property management partnership and furniture retailer partnership by allowing access to furniture pieces in our add/drop library.
What’s your tech stack?
Currently, the application is being built using Java with Android Studio and Firebase. We’re using Microsoft Azure Computer Vision and a customized Vision Model provided by Clarifai to analyze content alongside ARCore, SceneForm, CloudAnchors and Unity to enhance the AR environment. Design wise, we designed the marketing content and UI in Sketch, prototyping our final product with FramerJS.
Awesome! What are the next steps moving forward?
Moving forward, we’re finalizing potential partnerships for the upcoming year to customize our product for. Rather than creating an application that would lack any institutional foreground, we wanted to create an innovative solution for organizations that may not have the tech talent to pursue this solution. While we’re still undergoing negotiations, by March 2019, we’re looking to finalize our product for a retail corporation and/or property retailer.
The team behind Lucy
Thanks for updating us — we’re super excited to see where the team goes with Lucy!
Learn more about the Queen’s Technology Media Association at https://qtma.ca/
