Richard Lou
Covert Commuter
In today’s modern, technologically propelled society, people are coming up with more and more clever ways to keep their belongings secure. Perhaps the most common way involves the use of Closed-circuit Television (CCTV) cameras. While very useful in catching criminals unaware and in the act, there is nothing preventing these intrusive cameras from recording innocent people going about their daily business. They are scattered everywhere throughout the world, watching those who walk by without prior consent or knowledge. As such, privacy can be a very difficult commodity to come by. With the advent of the “Covert Commuter” mobile Android application, users are now able to see reported CCTV camera locations found by other users, and plot their commute around them using either the built in route plotter system or simply by hand. While not perfect, this application will help people to once again walk where they wish without prying eyes watching their every move.
Ideally, the application will come standard with many maps of surveillance cameras of many different areas in the United States, or even the world. Given my current skill level in mobile application development and available resources, this is very likely an impossible task for me to accomplish in only one semester. It is more reasonable that the application will only have maps of a few major United States cities and towns, if any at all. Whatever is not populated by camera locations will be a standard map with nothing on it. However, users are free to update their own local version of a map with known camera locations. They can share these maps with anyone by uploading them to a sort of “map bank.” This bank would be a location where all user-marked maps will be stored. Other users can download any of these maps onto their on mobile platform and use them for themselves, updating them if need be. There will also be an option to rate these user-created maps on a scale from one to five. Users can sort the map bank by highest rating, most recent, alphabetical order, or most downloaded. There will be an easy to access option to upload the maps, and the map banks will be accessible by an in-app interface. This dynamic application will be almost entirely based on user reported data. It will be important to get users to make and upload their maps, and I will have to give this serious deliberation before coming to a solution.
Users can also take pictures of the surveillance cameras and associate it with a mark on the map. This will be done as easily as selecting a mark, then choosing the option the “take a picture” on a small menu that will pop up. These images will be uploaded along with the rest of the map should the user decide to submit it to the “map bank.” Many smartphone cameras these days are capable of taking very high quality images, and if many of them are uploaded to wherever I will store the maps, space will run out rather quickly. To help mitigate this issue, images will be compressed into smaller, lower quality versions. Users can then click on a marked location of a camera, and an image of it will pop up. Should the user decide the image is not accurate, they have a choice to delete it or replace it with their own.
As mentioned earlier, this project will be a mobile application, for the Android platform. I will be using various code editors to write the code for the program. I am choosing a mobile application because I am a computer science major, and I believe I can make the most impact by doing something related to coding. Since today’s world is very focused on mobility and the smartphone, I think this would be the best medium to use.
I will need to see if I can find existing maps of surveillance camera locations, as it would be very difficult for me to find and map them by myself. If I do find these maps, I must somehow translate them into whatever map my Android application will be using. I assume this will be a rather difficult task, and understand that it may not be plausible. If this is the case, then I would probably make an example map to place in the “map bank,” and hope other users will follow my example and add their own data. I will also need to learn the coding language used to write mobile applications. There are very many different languages I could use, so it will be an important task to find one that is best suited for my needs and I am comfortable using.
As for the code itself, I will definitely need to do some intensive research about maps and route planners. I am sure I will be able to find some open source map or trip planner programs that I can reference for this task. I have had considerable experience with code in other languages, so I do not think the actual writing of the code will be too difficult.
Another difficult task I will have to consider is making the graphical user interface. Despite all my knowledge of computers, I have never taken any courses in graphical design and I have a very limited understanding of Adobe Photoshop. All my previous work has been on the backend of programs (the code part). I have no experience whatsoever on the frontend (the GUI). This will be one of the most time-consuming parts of my project, as I will have to learn how to use various graphical editors and create something presentable. Then I will have to determine how to link the frontend with the backend, which will also be no easy task for me.
I then must figure out the process of putting my application into the application store. As I have never done anything of this sort before, I will have to do some research on the application making process.
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