Enhancement of navigation technology using augmented reality

Abstract

Navigation technology has observed a tremendous advancement in the last 10 years with people shifting from using traditional maps to satellite based navigation smartphone apps such as Google maps and Apple maps. These applications mainly focus on outdoor navigation and represent the route in a 2-D layout, which sometimes lacks clarity when it comes to distinguishing between overlapping paths. One more area where this project is focused is indoor navigation. Indoor navigation can be helpful for navigating inside big buildings like hospitals, malls and airports. For example, when a user enters a mall and he or she needs to find a particular showroom, he just needs to put the name of that showroom and he would get 3-D augmented objects on his device which will point to that showroom as he follows the designated path. Augmented reality is used combined with satellite based GPS technology to navigate outdoors as well as indoors. The application uses 3-D markers to point the direction to the user in a real time environment on their devices which will be easy to understand and navigate. At the same time it will augment location based point of interest along the path, which will provide more clarity to the user about his or her environment. From this project we hope to develop a navigation application for users which is easy to use and understand.