Nahush Bhanage

EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley

Technical Report No. UCB/EECS-2014-73

May 14, 2014

http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2014/EECS-2014-73.pdf

Indoor positioning systems help in the localization of objects or spaces inside a building, where Global Positioning System (GPS) and cellular network don’t work effectively. These systems can be much more useful than just localizing objects, if they are augmented with relevant information on the user interface. This paper demonstrates, with a prototype, one such use case where an indoor positioning system can be made more useful by rendering relevant 3D graphics on the mobile display. It also describes our application development process, right from target user interviews to an interactive high-fidelity prototype development in Android. Localization is achieved by creating a location API simulator and using the orientation sensors in the phone/tablet. Relevant graphical information, determined based on the user’s context and selection, is rendered using OpenGL on top of the live camera stream. User studies indicated that overlaying points of interest on the camera view significantly enhanced the user experience in indoor navigation. Localization can be made even more robust with the help of object detection techniques. To summarize, there is a strong untapped potential in augmented reality techniques in the context of indoor navigation and we have attempted to demonstrate this in our application. Our solution is generic and can be easily configured to be used in any indoor space such as malls, hospitals, museums etc.

Advisors: Björn Hartmann and Donald Wroblewski

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BibTeX citation:

@mastersthesis{Bhanage:EECS-2014-73,
    Author= {Bhanage, Nahush},
    Title= {Improving User Experiences in Indoor Navigation Using Augmented Reality},
    School= {EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley},
    Year= {2014},
    Month= {May},
    Url= {http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2014/EECS-2014-73.html},
    Number= {UCB/EECS-2014-73},
    Abstract= {Indoor positioning systems help in the localization of objects or spaces inside a building, where Global Positioning System (GPS) and cellular network don’t work effectively. These systems can be much more useful than just localizing objects, if they are augmented with relevant information on the user interface. This paper demonstrates, with a prototype, one such use case where an indoor positioning system can be made more useful by rendering relevant 3D graphics on the mobile display. It also describes our application development process, right from target user interviews to an interactive high-fidelity prototype development in Android. Localization is achieved by creating a location API simulator and using the orientation sensors in the phone/tablet. Relevant graphical information, determined based on the user’s context and
selection, is rendered using OpenGL on top of the live camera stream. User studies indicated that overlaying points of interest on the camera view significantly enhanced the user experience in indoor navigation. Localization can be made even more robust with the help of object detection techniques. To summarize, there is a strong untapped potential in augmented reality techniques in the context of indoor navigation and we have attempted to demonstrate this in our application. Our solution is generic and can be easily configured to be used in any indoor space such as malls, hospitals, museums etc.},
}

EndNote citation:

%0 Thesis
%A Bhanage, Nahush 
%T Improving User Experiences in Indoor Navigation Using Augmented Reality
%I EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley
%D 2014
%8 May 14
%@ UCB/EECS-2014-73
%U http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2014/EECS-2014-73.html
%F Bhanage:EECS-2014-73