CSE498, Collaborative Design, Spring 2021
Computer Science and Engineering
Michigan State University

Founded in 1937 in East Lansing, MSU Federal Credit Union provides a variety of financial services to students, faculty and staff at Michigan State University and Oakland University. With 21 branches and over 300,000 members, it is the largest university-based credit union in the world.

MSUFCU provides a variety of financial education resources to its customers to ensure they are making the best monetary decisions. Our Augmented Reality Financial Education application serves to gamify saving money and provide encouragement to their customers throughout the process.

Our mobile app teaches customers about saving money through a new feature called goal journeys, which includes various savings goals that a user can choose from, such as saving for a beach vacation, paying off student loans, or buying a house.

After a user selects a goal journey, they are asked to set aside a certain amount of money for the goal, as well as determine what their overall savings goal is and how long they want to save. Once this information is gathered, our application offers detailed savings reports, and their overall progress towards their goal.

As the user progresses towards their goal, they have the option of using our augmented reality view, which helps them visualize their progress towards their goal. For example, as the user saves money, the AR view for the beach vacation goal journey shows the user with a beach towel, then with sunglasses and a surfboard, until they eventually reach their savings goal, and the augmented reality view shows them on vacation. This visualization of progress helps fully immerse the customer in their savings goal.

Our Augmented Reality Financial Education mobile app is built using Swift for iOS and Java for Android. The web app is built using ReactJS. The back end for all applications is built using PHP and PHPMyAdmin.