An ARCore-Based Augmented Reality Campus Navigation System

Currently, the route planning functions in 2D/3D campus navigation systems in the market are unable to process indoor and outdoor localization information simultaneously, and the UI experiences are not optimal because they are limited by the service platforms. An ARCore-based augmented reality campus navigation system is designed in this paper in order to solve the relevant problems. Firstly, the proposed campus navigation system uses ARCore to enhance reality by presenting 3D information in real scenes. Secondly, a visual inertial ranging algorithm is proposed for real-time locating and map generating in mobile devices. Finally, rich Unity3D scripts are designed in order to enhance users’ autonomy and enjoyment during navigation experience. In this paper, indoor navigation and outdoor navigation experiments are carried out at the Lingang campus of Shanghai University of Electric Power. Compared with the AR outdoor navigation system of Gaode, the proposed AR system can achieve increased precise outdoor localization by deploying the visual inertia odometer on the mobile phone and realizes the augmented reality function of 3D information and real scene, thus enriching the user’s interactive experience. Furthermore, four groups of students have been selected for system testing and evaluation. Compared with traditional systems, such as Gaode map or Internet media, experimental results show that our system could facilitate the effectiveness and usability of learning on campus.

TATU: an Approach for Supporting Tourists with Disabilities to Indoor and Outdoor Navigation using Mobile Devices

People with disabilities living in Brazil face great difficulties in the tasks of daily life mainly due to the lack of accessibility in public spaces, products and services. In this context, we noticed a lack of a computing tool that embraces both people with visual and hearing impairment. This work presents TATU -- a mobile application for both Android and iOS platforms aimed at supporting people with visual or hearing impairment to enjoy Brazilian tourist attractions, including both open-air and indoor spaces. TATU application has an adaptive interface exclusively designed for each of the impairment user profiles, it can work on guided tour mode by indoor navigation using BLE beacons and outdoor navigation using GPS. Our solution was evaluated by three experiments, one of which was carried out with blind volunteers and TATU application obtained satisfactory results for both spacious attractions with the lowest density of collection items and for the smallest spaces.

Outdoor Navigation System by AR

Mobile map applications such as Google Maps often don’t provide detailed information about facility areas such as amusement parks and university campuses. In addition, there are some people who cannot reach their destination just by reading a flat map. Therefore, in this research, we have developed an AR (Augmented Reality) navigation application for facilities to solve these problems. In addition, by using Kalman filtering to estimate user position, we could improve the accuracy of AR objects display.