[757labs] Augmented Reality Indoors?

[Trevor Lewis]

I'll start off by saying "Hi!" I've been following the 757labs exploits for
a while, and just haven't had a chance to make it to one of the open house
events. Anyway...

This is an idea I've spent a lot of time thinking about. Wifi is an abysmal
way to map a space, too much noise, too many things to degrade the signal.
If I were forced to do it I think the easiest way might be to use multiple
routers blanketting the same area at different frequencies. A network of
small circuits, sensitive to each frequency, will allow you to determine the
relative strength of the transmitters at a particular location. A person
walking through the space is going to occlude transmitters and receivers,
changing the map of the RF in the room. I just don't know if a person is
going to make a large enough occlusion that it can reliably be detected.
Honestly it's just a reallllly cool smart motion sensor, or an excuse to
wear tinfoil hats. :)

Some issues would be gathering the data from the receivers, and turning that
into a map. You're also not going to be able to reliably tell the
orientation of the person moving through the space. It's a safe bet most
people will be facing the direction they're moving, but y'all could be
throwing a moonwalking competition or something.

Have you thought about using something like the edge-finding algorithm that
Goggles uses? It's actually a really good at what it does, and would be even
better if you could make Goggles not search Google, and just work from a
limited data set consisting of patterns built from the lab space.

The ADK is also an easy way to marry external sensing with a phone. I had it
set up and working when it was first released, but got distracted with other
projects before I got it to do anything more interesting than run the
sample/demo code.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://757labs.org/pipermail/757labs/attachments/20110913/72716433/attachment.html>