Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Sep 14, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: Sep 19, 2018 - Oct 27, 2018
Date Accepted: Jan 7, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
An Argument Against Cross-Platform Development: Lessons From an Augmented Reality App Prototype for Rural Emergency Responders
Background:
Mobile augmented reality (MAR) apps offer potential support for emergency responders in rural areas.
Objective:
In this report, we described lessons learned from the development process of augmented reality (AR) Farm Mapping to Assist, Protect and Prepare Emergency Responders (MAPPER), a MAR app that provides emergency responders onsite information about the agricultural operation they enter.
Methods:
Cross-platform frameworks were used to create AR MAPPER to accommodate budget constraints and overcome issues with markerless MAR technologies. Although the single codebase and Web technologies streamlined development, cross-device hardware limitations impacted location accuracy, lengthened the development cycle, and required regular updates to third-party libraries.
Results:
A hybrid development approach of using Web-based technologies with native tie-ins for specialized components and enhanced performance cut time and costs. This also led to consistency across multiple platforms and ensured that there is only a single set of source files to modify for Android and iPhone operating systems. Meanwhile, active development was delayed by some major hurdles. Apple and Google both released new versions of their operating systems, and the Wikitude framework issued four major updates, each of which brought with it some important enhancements and also led to some new issues.
Conclusions:
Developers should consider single platform native development to benefit from platform-specific MAR implementations and to avoid development, testing, and maintenance costs associated with cross-platform implementation. Emergency response organizations may be more likely to utilize a single platform across the devices used by their command staff. This also reduces the benefits of cross-platform development. Furthermore, providing map-based, non-AR cross-platform apps for landowners, farmers, and ranchers would help improve and maintain data quality, which is crucial for the utility and user experience of MAR apps.
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.