About Us

The Cape Flats Nature Reserve on the campus of the University of the Western Cape provides refuge to over 200 plant species, many endemic to the Western Cape. As part of the reserve’s recreational activities, the environmental education officer offers guided walks on the ecological importance of the reserve This often takes over an hour and can be daunting, hence done only once a day. To solve this challenge, this project develops an Augmented Reality (AR) mobile application that would allow visitors to experience the nature reserve in their own time without a guide. AR markers are situated at interest points around the reserve and in conjunction with a mobile application, provide information about plants of interest in a similar manner that a sign board would. The goal of this project is the application of AR for self-guided tour. Among the advantages of this project are repeated accuracy of information and reaching a broader audience for environmental education.

Definition of Augmented Reality: Augmented reality is an interactive experience of a real-world environment where the objects that reside in the real-world are "augmented" by computer-generated perceptual information, sometimes across multiple sensory modalities, including visual, auditory, haptic, somatosensory, and olfactory[Wikipedia].