ARBIN: Augmented Reality Based Indoor Navigation System

Abstract

Due to the popularity of indoor positioning technology, indoor navigation applications have been deployed in large buildings, such as hospitals, airports, and train stations, to guide visitors to their destinations. A commonly-used user interface, shown on smartphones, is a 2D floor map with a route to the destination. The navigation instructions, such as turn left, turn right, and go straight, pop up on the screen when users come to an intersection. However, owing to the restrictions of a 2D navigation map, users may face mental pressure and get confused while they are making a connection between the real environment and the 2D navigation map before moving forward. For this reason, we developed ARBIN, an augmented reality-based navigation system, which posts navigation instructions on the screen of real-world environments for ease of use. Thus, there is no need for users to make a connection between the navigation instructions and the real-world environment. In order to evaluate the applicability of ARBIN, a series of experiments were conducted in the outpatient area of the National Taiwan University Hospital YunLin Branch, which is nearly 1800 m2, with 35 destinations and points of interests, such as a cardiovascular clinic, x-ray examination room, pharmacy, and so on. Four different types of smartphone were adopted for evaluation. Our results show that ARBIN can achieve 3 to 5 m accuracy, and provide users with correct instructions on their way to the destinations. ARBIN proved to be a practical solution for indoor navigation, especially for large buildings.

An Indoor Navigation Methodology for Mobile Devices by Integrating Augmented Reality and Semantic Web

“…Thus, an initial position can be defined as , which can be established in multiple ways, as previously mentioned. For example, through marker detection [ 15 ], Lbeacons and sensors [ 21 ], and WiFi fingerprinting [ 27 ], to mention a few. Tracking user’s movements.…”

“…They calculate the navigation route using the Dijkstra algorithm and display navigation guidance through AR or visualizing the created 3D model. Similarly, Huang et al [ 21 ] use Lbeacons (Bluetooth low energy beacons) for positioning and Dijkstra for pathfinding.…”

“…The aforementioned systems and approaches have been tested on a diversity of areas and buildings. For example in hospitals [ 21 ], shopping mall [ 16 , 19 ], universities/college [ 6 , 27 ], and so on. A summary of the components of the related work can be seen in Table 1 .…”

Advanced Assistive Maintenance Based on Augmented Reality and 5G Networking

“…Nowadays, we dispose of a wide variety of VR and AR devices, from cheap, smartphone-based ones, such as the papercraft FOV2GO from the University of Southern California [ 10 ], to more advanced and professional devices [ 11 ] such as Microsoft HoloLens, Magic Leap One and Google Glass. In addition to assistive maintenance [ 1 , 2 ], AR has proven its effectiveness in a wide range of applications, such as training for high-precision tasks [ 12 ], indoor navigation in large buildings (such as hospitals, airports and train stations) [ 13 ], education [ 14 ], image-guided surgery [ 15 ] and telemedicine [ 16 ].…”

Indoor Positioning and Navigation

“…However, due to the limitations of a 2D navigation map, users may be under mental pressure and become confused while making a connection between the real environment and the 2D navigation map before proceeding. For this reason, authors Huang et al [ 18 ] developed ARBIN, an augmented reality-based navigation system that displays navigation instructions on the real environment screen for ease of use. The positions are determined using BLE beacons and RSSI models.…”