CemetARy is a mobile application designed to help visitors navigate national veteran cemeteries and learn about the service members buried there. Developed as a senior design project in partnership with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ National Cemetery Administration, it addresses a common challenge faced by anyone visiting these sites: the cemeteries are vast, individual gravesites are difficult to locate, and finding biographical information about a specific veteran often requires tedious online searching.
The app brings that information directly to the visitor through two core features. The first is guided navigation—users can select a veteran from a searchable list and be led straight to the gravesite using either a standard 2D map or an augmented reality view that overlays directions onto the phone’s camera, making it easier to find a location when the surrounding landscape offers few visual landmarks. The second feature uses optical character recognition (OCR) to scan a headstone with the phone’s camera and instantly retrieve information about the veteran resting there.
By combining augmented reality, GPS navigation, and text recognition, CemetARy transforms a visit to a national cemetery into an accessible, educational experience. It honors the histories of fallen service members and makes those stories easy to discover—turning each gravesite into a doorway to the life and service of the person it commemorates.