ARrowhead: a mobile augmented reality application using wi-fi positioning for indoor contexts

Location based services (LBS) targeted at the smartphone market are increasing in prevalence and have given rise to a plethora of location-aware applications for both indoor and outdoor contexts. The Global Positioning System (GPS) is used extensively in many of these applications for location mapping, however GPS is known to have serious limitations indoors due to signal blocking. In this work, Wi-Fi Positioning Systems (WPS) are explored with the aim of identifying a suitable alternative that works well indoors. This paper details the design of a WPS whose positioning component includes the use of trilateration and variants of the k-nearest neighbour algorithm. The resulting positioning component was tested indoors in two separate environments of different sizes, yielding an accuracy of within 1.6 m in the best-case scenario, which greatly outperforms GPS under similar conditions. Arguably, the positioning component can form the basis for any number of LBS, however in this paper; its use in supporting Augmented Reality (AR) is explored. The AR component incorporates context and preference features and permits the exploration of indoor physical spaces while layering graphical content onto the standby camera display. The resulting application was coined ARrowhead. ARrowhead was tested qualitatively and verified to perform as expected. The prototype provides a foundation for further development.