DARGS: Dynamic AR Guiding System for Indoor Environments

摘要

Complex public buildings, such as airports, use various systems to guide people to a certain destination. Such approaches are usually implemented by showing a floor plan that has guiding signs or color coded lines on the floor. With a technology that supports six degrees of freedom (6DoF) tracking in indoor environments, it is possible to guide people individually, thereby considering obstacles, path lengths, or pathways for handicapped people. With an augmented reality (AR) device, such as a smart phone or AR glasses, the path can be presented on top of the real environment. In this paper, we present DARGS, an algorithm, which calculates a path through a complex building in real time. Usual path planning algorithms use either shortest paths or dynamic paths for robot interaction. The human factor in a real environment is not considered. The main advantage of DARGS is the incorporation of the current field of view (FOV) of the used device to visualize a more dynamic presentation. Rather than searching for the AR content with a small FOV, with the presented approach the user always gets a meaningful three-dimensional overlay of the path independent of the viewing direction. A detailed user study is performed to prove the applicability of the system. The results indicate that the presented system is especially helpful in the first few important seconds of the guiding process, when the user is still disoriented.