A Proposal for Augmented Reality Integration in Navigation

Sammanfattning: In today’s society, approximately half of the world population utilize their smart phone for their everyday tasks as handling scheduled events, financial inquires and general social life, according to Ash Turner’s statistical study on the topic. They have been an amazing tool for helping people handle these tasks easily, conveniently and swiftly, all at the palm of our hand. This also includes traveling and navigation. Even for traveling by foot, smartphones possess features that makes it a flexible option. As such, navigation apps have been of heavy use. They do have some problems, such as lacking information of more recent paths or smaller known areas that have not been added to the database. Hence, Neava AB had an interest in exploring this field and find a solution using Augmented Reality (AR). This thesis will document the process, from the creation of the development plan, to the development process, the final result and discussion. It will also showcase other applications of the AR technology in similar and completely different fields, along with future potential usage. The final prototype is a small program that allows the user to guided from a start position to a destination with visual aid in terms of an arrow that points the user towards the destination. It guides the user to a certain checkpoint between the two points. When the user has reached the checkpoint, they press the button on the screen to be guided to the next checkpoint with audio in the form of a audio clip informing which direction to turn. This is repeated until the destination is reached. At that point, pressing the button again will bring out text. The current text is dummy text currently, but is meant to contain information about the destination in the final build. This thesis will also analyse the reliability of the GPS and Gyroscope components within a smartphone by request of the examiner. This test is done by walking from a starting position towards a set location while recording the current coordinates and time since departure. These values are recorded in a text file. The program is then terminated and the process repeats itself back to the starting position. The data will then be visualised analysed to determine the stability. In the end, the prototype showed promise in becoming a commercial product with more development time. There were many features that did not make into the prototype such as a virtual trail for improved visual guidance and have voicelines and checkpoints change automatically. The GPS tests showed great promise in reliability and stability, showcasing small deviation which could be attributed to other factors than the component itself. The gyroscope was a bit less reliable, but that can be addressed in software.