Mobile Campus Tour Guide for UTP

In line with the advancement of current technology, popularity of mobile tour guide application for universities is growing rapidly among the universities outside of Malaysia. Local universities are currently trying to adapt to this new phenomena. Current method used in exploring places in campus is time consuming and not effective. Common workaround is to look for the signboards or ask around but there are cases where the direction given was wrong and confusing. The objective of this project is to develop an android mobile tour guide application, ‘UTP Campus Tour Guide’, for Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS that provide users with interactive map to help them in exploring UTP. A review of existing mobile tour guide applications reveals diverse design methods were used for developing these applications. The results of careful analysis of these applications informed the design of the proposed application. The application is developed using MIT App Inventor 2 as the platform. A customized map of UTP and specific routes from one location to another location was developed using Google Maps Engine and then tested continuously to ensure its functionality working flawlessly. Users are able to find their preferred destination easily and can have a self-guided tour on their own with the help of this mobile tour guide application. Potential target users for this system will be mainly new students, new staffs and visitors of UTP who are not familiar with places in UTP. This mobile application will act as a map navigator for them to find places in UTP easily.