Design of a Mobile Augmented Reality-based Indoor Navigation System

Abstract

GPS-based navigation technology has been widelyused in most of the commercial navigation applications nowadays. However, its usage in indoor navigation is not as effective as when it is used at outdoor environment. Much research and developments of indoor navigation technology involve additional hardware installation which usually incur high setup cost. In this paper, research and comparisons were done to determine the appropriate techniques of indoor positioning, pathfinding, and route guidance for an indoor navigation method. The aim of this project is to present a simple and costeffective indoor navigation system. The proposed system uses the existing built-in sensors embedded in most of the mobile devices to detect the user location, integrates with AR technology to provide user an immersive navigation experience. In this project, an indoor navigation mobile application was developed and tested. The development demonstrates the usage of IndoorAtlas which enables indoor positioning through technology fusion to detect user's position and obtain the route to destination, and ARCore to display AR guidance using the computed route. Surveys were carried out to gauge the efficiency of the method and to gather the feedback from the participants. The architecture of the method and the demonstration of the application is presented.

Designing and developing a mobile application for indoor real-time positioning and navigation in healthcare facilities

“…The indicator is placed in a specific position to provide location information when it is scanned. For this technique, an additional cost is required to place the QR codes inside the building and to maintain them up to date in settings which are frequently changing, such as hospitals [ 25 ].…”

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.…”

“…Approaches usually obtain the navigation path by traditional pathfinding algorithms such as Dijsktra or A*, but have also resorted to stored information with possible directions [ 6 ] or by SLAM algorithms [ 24 ]. On the other hand, the visualization of navigation directions by means of AR is usually through virtual objects such as arrows, lines, or animated objects [ 27 ].…”

“…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 .…”

CultReal—A Rapid Development Platform for AR Cultural Spaces, with Fused Localization

“…A map recovery and fusion strategy using visual-inertial SLAM have been proposed for the collaborative AR on multiple mobile devices. Ng et al [ 25 ] use inertial sensors embedded in mobile devices and the IndoorAtlas technology [ 26 ], enabling indoor positioning and offering guidance to users through ARCore. A comprehensive survey on vision-based indoor localization, which also discusses the AR domain, is provided by Morar et al [ 27 ].…”