If you own a car in a major city, chances are you’ve gotten a parking ticket. Parking signs can get confusing, Park Rangr does the hard work for you in interpreting the signage while also ensuring that you’re leaving your car in a good area where you can find it again.
The team built the app during the TechCrunch Disrupt SF Hackathon in 24 hours.
It’s a pretty straightforward process: You take a snapshot of the parking sign near where your vehicle is and the app grabs data relating to the spot restrictions so you’re not caught off-guard parking where you’re not supposed to. The app lets you know how long you can stay in the spot, what the crime rates are in the area so you can avoid break-ins, and what the walking score is for the area around you.
After you leave your vehicle, the app saves your location and lets you know how far away you are from your car and how long it will take for you to walk back.
At that point, the app also pinpoints your GPS location so that you can easily locate your ride using augmented reality. The hackathon group made up of Kevin Lay, Sid Bola, Nathanael Hardy and Ian McDowell used ARKit to bring AR visualizations into the app, allowing users to locate where their car is using a giant floating marker.
The group is looking to put Park Rangr in the app store at some point and hopes to add push notifications so users can get alerts to when they need to get back to their vehicle.