Augmented transit maps

Abstract

We introduce a new class of mobile augmented reality navigation applications that allow people to interact with transit maps in public transit stations and vehicles. Our system consists of a database of coded transit maps, a vision engine for recognizing and tracking planar objects, and a graphics engine to overlay relevant real-time navigation information, such as the user's current location and the time to destination. We demonstrate this system with a prototype application built from open source components only. The application runs on a Nokia N900 mobile phone equipped with Maemo, a Debian Linux-based operating system. We use the OpenCV library and the new Frankencamera API for the vision engine. The application is written using the LGPL licensed Qt C++ Framework.