Guiding People in Complex Indoor Environments Using Augmented Reality

Complex public buildings like airports use various systems to guide people to a certain destination. Such approaches are usually implemented by showing a floor plan, having guiding signs or color coded lines on the floor. With a technology that supports 6DOF tracking in indoor environments it is possible to guide people individually by using augmented reality guiding visualizations. The proposed research concentrates on three topics which are the main reason, why such a guiding system is still not available in real world situations. At first a tracking solution HyMoTrack is presented, based on a visual hybrid tracking approach for smart phones and tested in a real world airport scenario. The tracking and the guiding part of a reliable indoor navigation requests a 3D model of the environment. For that reason a 3D model generation algorithm was implemented, which automatically creates a 3D mesh out of a vectorized 2D floor plan. Finally the human aspect of an AR guiding system is researched and a novel AR path concept is presented for guiding people with AR devices. This FOVPath is designed to react not only to the position of the user and the target, but is also dependent on the view direction and the field of view (FOV) capabilities of the used device. This ensures that the user always gets reasonable information within the current FOV. To evaluate the concept technical evaluations and user studies were and will be performed.