Beryl AR Parking
Design Consultant (2021-22)
Beryl is a UK-based bike-shre platform that operates mainly in smaller towns and cities spread across the country. Since demand for bikes in these places is relatively low, they operate a fixed parking bay system with an out-of-bay fine.
This presented a unique problem: Parking bays in busy areas were often full while parking bays in the suburbs were few and far apart which discouraged overall use of the platform. Beryl apprached us at the Innoavtion Studio with an opportunity to work on a very interesting solution to this problem.
In 2022, Google launched the ARCore Geospatial API which apps to use AR-enabled Visual Positioning Service (VPS) technology through Google Maps and Street View data. Across the world, various cycle and scooter hire platforms took advantage of this technology in different ways including parking confirmation, better vehicle positioning and parking bay identification.
Beryl wanted to use the Geospatial API to create virtual parking bays to complement the existing physical ones. This would allow them to provide users more flexibility in parking their bikes and help them scale into areas that were previously underserved. This would encourage more people to cycle directly to their final destination.
The main goal with creating virtual bays was to make riding to a destination more efficient. So the AR parking feature needed to be as unintrusive as possible. We designed the feature with two mutually dependant flows: A parking guide and parking verification. If you choose to use the parking guide to find a bay, then you would have to use the parking check after.
Although the actual implementation of virtual parking bays is subject to coucil approval, here is a very quick video of the feature in action.