Augmented Reality based Mobile Application for Energy Monitoring and IoT Device Control

IoT has become an integrated part of our lives changing ways in which we operate our everyday appliances. In addition to making our home appliances smart, it has become a common trend for companies to adopt industry 4.0, which uses various sensors to monitor the equipment, machinery, and the work environment. We often come across multiple brands which make smart appliances but each brand comes with its separate mobile application for the appliance's operation. This requires us to switch between Apps to control these appliances if we at all remember which App controls which appliance. We intend to solve these two major inconveniences by creating a single mobile application that can control all these appliances using Augmented Reality technology. All we have to do is point our camera at the appliance that we need to operate and the App will display control options in real-time AR. This paper produces five important contributions: 1) An AR-based mobile application to control IoT devices and monitor the environment. 2) Implementing the mobile application using Unity 3D engine and Vuforia SDK. 3) Integrating a commercially available IoT device with the mobile application. 4) Integrating custom-made hardware IoT device with mobile application. 5) Integrating this combination to make our industries and homes smarter