Cost Estimation for an Augmented Reality based Indoor Navigation System

The client is looking to build an indoor navigation system for their employees , which helps them in locating the various services and departments present in the building. The two major challenges they want to address through this platform is to help the employees to feel at home in a really big building and encourage the employees to have more face to face interactions with their colleagues.

The proposed scope for this projects is to build a mobile based indoor navigation system power by augmented reality. This will give an immersed experience for the employees giving real time directions to navigate their workplace.

After analyzing the requirements, Perfomatix has come up with high-level functionality.

The user roles are as follows:

• Employees

The components are

• Native android application for employees
• Native iOS application for admin

Functional Specifications of the application include a custom AR Camera for navigating various services in each departments and buildings;

• Splash screen
• Landing page
• View AR camera
• Show Amenities present in the building
• Menu bar
• Employee details ( name and seat number)
• View 2D map

The AR camera has the following features customized for the client;

• Show guiding bars when selected on an amenity
• Show nearby amenities in the AR screen, when placed over
• Image recognition

Proposed Approach

ARKit1 is a tool for the development of Augmented Reality for Apple’s iOS. In March 2018, ARKit 1.5 was released. The significance of this is that the tool now supports vertical/horizontal surface recognition; this is crucial for our Augmented Reality tool to work. Using ARKit we can detect a wall as a vertical surface and estimate our distance to the surface.

Determining the surface area of any objects which are regular/irregular in shape is then simple. ARCore is an SDK developed by Google that allows augmented reality applications to be built. ARCore does the similar functionality of ARkit for Android Phones in doing the measuring function.

LOCATION TRACKING USING iBEACONS

• GUI – Displays augmented reality video with current position of user on the map
• AR navigation- places AR objects based on image identification
• Map Guidance- Locates Mobile device on the Map
• Image recognition engine – Detects the location of user based on the video frames captured from user’s mobile device
• Location Module – Locates mobile device based on the location id received from beacon
• Video frames are transferred to IR device and receives object results
• Localization module receives sensory data and by fusing it with other information returns location of the mobile device