PINwI

Abstract

Navigation in larger unfamiliar buildings like town halls, airports, shopping malls or other public indoor locations is often difficult for humans. Due to the high amount of infrastructure needed for indoor positioning, just a few navigation services for indoor environments exist. Therefore in many of these buildings 'YOU-ARE-HERE’ (YAH) maps are provided, often located at the entrance or other key places, to facilitate orientation and navigation within the building, but they have the disadvantages of being stationary. In this paper, we try to overcome these problems by presenting PINwI (Pedestrian Indoor Navigation without Infrastructure), an application that allows the user of a mobile camera device with integrated compass and accelerometer to utilize a photo of such an in- door YAH-map to navigate through the corresponding building. Using a dead reckoning approach, we enrich stationary analog YAH-maps with basic location functionality and turn them into a digital and dynamic medium that can help decision making while taking turns or estimating distances.