Explore London from the BT Tower
Venue AR visitor app
iOS visitor app for BT Tower — explore London landmarks in a pre-rendered view or in AR at the gallery, unlocked with Estimote beacons after altitude alone proved unreliable.
The brief was to enhance the visitor experience at BT Tower on iOS, with a limited at-home mode as well. Visitors could explore London landmarks and points of interest — over eighty, filterable by category — either through pre-rendered imagery or live AR at the top of the tower.
I developed the iPhone and iPad app in Swift. Geolocation and altitude alone were too inconsistent to unlock the venue features, so we placed Estimote beacons in the viewing gallery. For the AR view I used Core Motion with a fixed tower location relative to each point of interest, drawing on Apple’s guidance where open-source options were not accurate enough. Development started before ARKit shipped.
On-site testing surfaced magnetometer interference and the tower’s rotation; we added a horizon-alignment offset so visitors could calibrate overlays without a rewrite.
