Is it possible to use augmented reality indoors without GPS

Question

Im thinking of developing augmented reality app for my school library. Basically we alreayd have a machine which will give us the duis decimal code for where the book is but the librarian still has to tell us where this is. An augmented reality application on top of this to who people where the book is might work well I think.

Just wondering how difficult it is to do such a thing without GPS as its indoors.

Intel had a good solution http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WciFx66ojA4 but is it a viable app to make?

Answer 1

The IMHO easiest way would be to place some WLAN senders in the library and the use them to calculate the position based the signal strength of all WLAN senders in reception range.

There are a couple of scientific papers and demo-installations available around the world:

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=indoor+localization+wlan

Answer 2

If you haven't worked much with Android before, specifically with capturing and overlaying its video stream data I would say that creating an augmented reality application would be very difficult. I worked on a project capturing and analyzing live video streams through android for on-device analysis and found it significantly challenging.

If you're looking for an alternative I would suggest a static mapping application that showed a blueprint-like layout of the library, your current location at the terminal that provides the Dewey Decimal listing, and the calculated location of the book they just looked up. You can even add a section about the Dewey Decimal classification system and become your librarian's best friend.

If you really want to go for live navigation indoors your best bet may be through a combination of the compass and accelerometer data so you can infer direction and distance as a user moves through the environment. There are some good papers around in regard to this but you may need to go through the IEEE or ACM libraries to look them up.