AR Content Management App that Drives a US Startup

Customer

The Customer is a US startup that manufactures and installs interactive displays used in stores and shopping malls for advertising or customer entertainment purposes.

Challenge

The Customer needed to provide their clients with a convenient administration panel to create and manage the content for the smart screens they produced. However, the Customer lacked web development skills needed to launch the product fast enough to be ahead of competitors.

Solution

ScienceSoft’s team of a PM/BA, 2 Senior Backend Developers, a Senior Frontend Developer, a Middle Frontend Developer, and a QA specialist worked on the project for 6 months according to the SCRUM methodology.

The finished web-based administration panel offers functionality for 2 different business roles: high-level administration from the Customer’s side and local management by the Customer’s clients. The functionality for these roles differs and is determined at the moment of a user logging in.

Only an administrator from the Customer’s side can access the general database that stores different AR app templates. The Customer can create these templates using a special software development kit for Unity 3D developed by ScienceSoft’s AR development team. Publishing and unpublishing as well as editing these templates is possible at any time.

The high-level administration functionality allows setting up client accounts, thus granting them access to the web application. The Customer can also add devices – smart screens purchased by their clients and installed at certain locations – to enable remote control of the screens’ content.

As for client companies, they can use the AR templates from the database to create their custom AR apps (with the help of the same Unity 3D SDK) in the ‘App Maker’ menu. Once customized, these apps can be deployed to a client’s interactive display. In the ‘Devices’ menu, a client company can see a full list of their installed screens and manage them both individually and in bulk.

Results

The developed web-based content management app is a crucial part of the Customer’s market offer and now fully drives the Customer’s business. Since the software solution enables easy custom creation and management of AR content, it has already attracted the attention of multiple large brands all over the globe.

Technologies and Tools

Back end: NodeJS, Feathers JS, Sequelize, Docker, Amazon S3, MinIO, MariaDB, Redis, SaltStack, Go, Jenkins, Swagger.

Front end: React, Redux, Konva.js, Uppy React, Formik, Styled Components, HTML5.