Mobile Augmented Geo Data Visualization Based on Open Street Map

Alexander Erifiu, FH-Hagenberg

Details about the talk:
With increasingly powerful hardware and the miniaturization of sensor components, Augmented Reality has become a more and more interesting topic in the field of mobile computing. Since a 3rd generation smart phone, like the Android powered devices or the Apple iPhone, does already hold the necessary sensor components and CPU power to realize such a system, a variety of software has been developed around Augmented Reality.
The possibilities from the „enrichment of the reality“ with further information are diverse.
However the technically most challenging systems are pedestrian navigation applications that make heavy use of hardware sensors and geo-data in order to render the virtual objects and paths in real-time over(laying) the camera view of the phone.
One approach to such a system was already proposed by Narzt et al. in 2004, where nowadays smart-phone hardware was still unavailable and additional components had to be used to acquire the necessary information. The map data had to be stored locally because the mobile data connection was still too slow. However, bringing this approach to a nowadays smart phone opens up new possibilities.
Since it houses all the needed sensors, the internal GPS receiver can be used to position the user and the electronic compass and g-force sensor to determine a line of vision. This means that the user is able to explore the Augmented Reality world by looking around freely.
If now the geographic map content is downloaded „on the go“ and rendered into the live view of the camera the resulting question is, if the virtual objects will „match“ with the ones in the real world. This is subject to many parameters, not only the quality of the geo-data but also the hardware sensors. Furthermore, the geo-data has to be prepared and filtered for a mobile device to later transform it into vertex data and render it on the display of the phone.
The paper describes an approach to creating such a mobile augmented navigation system which is based upon Open Street Map data and the challenges which arise from it – such as missing topographic information. It will assess the usefulness of the whole system with especially the accuracy that can be achieved on the basis of a prototype.
The paper concludes with the insight that the accuracy, which can be achieved by such a system, is sufficient but not overall satisfactory. In certain (worst case) scenarios the system might fail due to bad GPS reception or incorrect geo-data. These scenarios and sources of error are discussed separately. It as well shows that the visualization and the processing of large amounts of data are very challenging topics on a mobile platform, but yet solvable.

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