Best Mobile Application and First Place Overall

Team: Sven Blaese, Camilo Cepeda Tarud, Dhawal Shah, Shreyansh Gandhi, Manas Apte

IDEA AND VALUE
This mobile search and social networking application with location-based advertising is great fun and highly usable owing to a very novel user interface. MoVue augments the handset camera viewfinder in real time with icons & information on personally relevant Points Of Interest. As a result, simply “looking around” (with the device) provides desired information.

FUNCTION
When a user launches MoVue and enters search terms, MoVue transforms the rectilinear coordinates of returned Points Of Interest (POI) into polar coordinates with reference to the user, maps them to pixels in the handset viewfinder, and creates an overlay in the viewfinder with appropriate icons annotated with POI names, distance from the user, and layer/color priority reflecting personal ranking based on history. Additional drill-down contextual information and filters are available through the icon for each POI.

ELEMENTS
The MoVue application prototype runs on Android handsets. A dedicated MoVue Web Server handles subscriber information and the advertiser interface (not implemented). An aggregation Web Proxy in the architecture increases performance and scalability (not implemented). MoVue is designed to use information from Open Web Service APIs. The principal data and content resource used in the prototype is Yelp!

BUSINESS MODEL
The annotated visual interface is proposed as a premium service, payable following a free-trial period. For free use following the trial period, an interactive, annotated 2-D map (to be implemented) will replace the visual user interface providing access to the same search results, user generated content, location and presence based social networking functions, and location based advertising features.