The virtual O week (“virtuelle O-Woche”) was a project that was performed by students of our chair. The goal of the project was the conception and the development of a mobile assistant for the support of freshman students.

The starting point of the project was the traditional orientation week (O week). The orientation week is devoted to freshman students and has the purpose of helping them to get along with university life. The project was supposed to extend this offering by providing access to modern technology features to improve the situational and ubiquitous support of freshman students. This support was implemented by providing answers to recurring questions with the use of multimedia technologies like videos for explanations. Moreover, the project included solutions for students that had the purpose of facilitating their life as a student.

The result of the project is a server-supported mobile app that includes the following features:

• Room finder: Finding a room at the university campus is especially not easy for new students and external people. The room finder supports users to find a specific room if they enter the room code or the room name in common speech. The navigation can take place with a visual illustration or with GPS support.
• Campus explorer: The users have the possibility to use augmented reality technologies for the exploration of the campus. For this feature it is necessary for the users to make use of their smartphone camera to get additional information while seeing the campus through the camera.
• Digital schedule: Students have the possibility to create a digital schedule that includes their lectures and tutorials. This function is supposed to help the students to not miss their study events.
• Tutorials: How do I pay in the canteen? Where do I get my student ID? How do I borrow books? Where can I find the Audimax? For all these questions exist situational and time-independent multimedia answers.
• Contact data exchange: At the beginning of the study time it is usual to meet many new people. Nowadays and with the help of the contact data exchange feature, the exchange of handwritten papers with mobile phone numbers is out-of-date. The feature enables students to automatically save contact data to their smartphones.
• Linkage of many features: All the features that are described above are connected. The location of an event is easy to find with the room finder. It is also possible to navigate to this location with the campus explorer feature. Moreover, there might be tutorials for specific locations. The user also can scan QR codes (e.g. for the loading of the canteen card) to get explanations very fast.

Supervisor:

André Diermann, Michael Beul

Project team members:

Dennis Böhl, Tim Fillbrunn, Dominik Gantenberg, Mark Noetzel, Daniel Tewolde, Manh Hung Vu