A smart city is most useful when you can stand inside it.
A smart city already generates a deluge of data — traffic, air quality, energy, transit — and the usual answer is another dashboard. The students I supervised asked a harder question: what if the city itself were the dashboard? Their project, Smart City with AR, layers the data onto the place it came from, viewed through a phone or AR glasses.
What it does
- →Anchors live sensor data — air quality, traffic flow, building energy — to the real-world location it describes.
- →Lets a user walk through a district and see the dataset the city is actually producing, in place.
- →Turns abstract metrics ("AQI 142") into a spatial impression you can feel from the street.
Why this matters in Physics
It is easy to read “Eureka, Physics” and expect a circuit. But our Faculty of Physics & Physics Engineering at VNU-HCM has always sat where instrumentation, signal processing, and computation meet. This project belongs there — every overlay is a measurement, every measurement is a sensor, every sensor is a physical decision. The AR is just the last hop from physics back to the eye.
Supervising is not directing. It is making sure the question stays sharp while the students do the cutting.
