Development of a Platform-independent Renderer for the Rendering of OpenStreetMap Indoor Maps in Flutter

Abstract

With the development and spread of new localisation technologies, the construction of bigger buildings, as well as the continuous growth of digitalisation, the importance of indoor maps rises. However, developers who want to make use of indoor maps face several obstacles. Among them are the often costly data acquisition, the increased development overhead for diverse platforms, plus the missing support of indoor rendering in many libraries. In this work, the development of a free solution for platform-independent rendering of indoor data is presented based on public geodata that is provided by OpenStreetMap. For this goal, existing open source technologies such as the Flutter toolkit and the Mapsforge library were used in order to develop a flexible and freely accessible rendering engine that directly integrates in outdoor maps and leads to a seamless rendering of both indoor and outdoor in one map view. To prove platform independence and to measure performance, a prototype app was developed in Flutter. Finally, possibilities and limitations of this approach were examined in more detail.