Argus

Building Intelligence for NYC — Point your phone at any building and instantly see its story, ownership, value, violations, and development potential.

Argus turns your iPhone camera into a building x-ray. GPS, compass heading, altitude, and 3D ray casting identify which building you're looking at. Eight NYC public data APIs assemble the full picture. AI generates the narrative.

How It Works

1. Point — Open the app, aim at a building. The targeting reticle locks on.
2. Identify — GPS + heading + 3D ray casting resolves the building in <1 second.
3. Discover — Bottom sheet slides up with 5 tabs of intelligence.
4. Pin — Save buildings to your personal collection for later review.

What You See

Tab	Data Source	What's There
Story	Bedrock AI + PLUTO	AI-generated building narrative, fun facts, notable tenants
Owner	ACRIS (legals + master + parties)	LLC name, purchase price, sale date, related properties
Value	PLUTO + DOF	Assessed value, zoning, FAR, air rights (unused sq ft), tax status
Violations	DOB + HPD	Open violations, complaints, stop work orders
Permits	DOB	Active permits, estimated costs, contractors

Features

• 3D Ray Casting — Casts a ray from your 3D position through building volumes using NYC LiDAR-measured roof heights (Building Footprints dataset u9wf-3gbt). Tall buildings correctly occlude shorter ones. Falls back to PLUTO floor-count estimation when LiDAR data unavailable.
• 4 Range Modes — Nearby (30m/90°), Street (100m/45°), Block (300m/20°), Far (800m/8°). Heading cone auto-narrows for precision skyline sniping. Far mode sorts by heading alignment, not distance.
• Air Rights Ghost — Toggle to visualize unused development rights as a translucent green overlay above the building. Shows potential additional floors, unused FAR, and square footage.
• Diplomatic Detection — Flags foreign government/consular properties and tax-exempt buildings from PLUTO ownership patterns (consulates, embassies, missions, UN, city/state/federal agencies).
• Altitude + Pitch — Barometric altimeter (CoreMotion) + gyroscope pitch projects camera ray to ground level when elevated. Enables rooftop and high-floor identification.
• Targeting Reticle — Center crosshair that shrinks with distance mode (120px nearby → 40px far). Green when identified, yellow when searching, pulsing animation.
• Address Search — Geoclient v2 typeahead for manual building lookup and calibration.
• Pin Collection — Save buildings to your personal map. Pinned buildings shown in Explore tab and web dashboard.
• CLIP Visual Matching — CLIP ViT-B/32 on SageMaker Serverless generates 512-dim embeddings. Image index seeded with 5,000+ Street View photos, grows with every user scan.
• Scan Analytics — Real-time heat counters (HEAT#{date}) + daily batch aggregation. Powers interest heat maps and neighborhood trajectory analysis.

Architecture

iPhone (Swift 6)
  ├── Camera + GPS + Compass + Altimeter + Gyroscope
  ├── BuildingIdentifier → POST /identify
  ├── Bottom Sheet (5 tabs)
  └── Explore Map (pinned buildings)

AWS Backend (CDK v2)
  ├── API Gateway → Lambda (Python 3.12)
  │   ├── /identify — GPS + heading + 3D ray cast → building candidates
  │   ├── /buildings/{bbl} — full building detail
  │   ├── /pins — pin/unpin/list saved buildings
  │   └── /search/address — Geoclient v2 typeahead
  ├── Step Functions — data assembly → story gen → visual match → analytics
  ├── DynamoDB — single-table (BLDG#, SCAN#, GEO#, HEAT#, PIN#)
  ├── SageMaker Serverless — CLIP ViT-B/32 embeddings
  ├── Bedrock (Claude) — AI story generation
  └── CloudFront — dashboard + static assets

NYC Public Data (all free)
  ├── GeoClient v2 — address → BBL resolution
  ├── Building Footprints — LiDAR roof heights + ground elevation (3D)
  ├── PLUTO — zoning, FAR, year built, building class, owner
  ├── ACRIS — ownership, sales, mortgages (legals + master + parties)
  ├── DOB — permits, violations, certificates
  ├── HPD — housing complaints, violations
  ├── LPC — landmark designations
  ├── DOF — assessed values, tax class
  └── 311 — service requests

Stack

iOS: Swift 6, AVFoundation, CoreLocation, CoreMotion, ARKit-ready, MapKit

Backend: CDK v2, Lambda (Python 3.12), DynamoDB, Step Functions, API Gateway, Cognito, S3, EventBridge

ML: SageMaker Serverless (CLIP ViT-B/32), Bedrock (Claude Haiku)

Frontend: Next.js 16, Mapbox GL JS, Tailwind CSS

Data Products

The app is free. The aggregate, anonymized scan data is the product:

• Interest Heat Maps — which buildings and blocks get the most attention
• Intent Signals — tab depth reveals investor vs tourist vs inspector
• Street-Level Imagery — continuously updated building photos from user scans
• Neighborhood Trajectories — scan velocity as a gentrification leading indicator

Live

• API: https://7c46jp99ta.execute-api.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/prod/
• Dashboard: https://d4tb4yqt8i4xo.cloudfront.net
• iOS: Build from Xcode (ios/Argus/Argus.xcodeproj)