Digital Map using Augmented Reality on Smart Devices: Motivation, Design, and Implementation

This article describes the design and implementation of an online mobile app that is capable of locating users and displaying related information on a digital Augmented Reality map. The users can directly capture and interact with general paper maps using a cell phones built-in camera and GPS Chipset. By registering the map data in the database, this system can provide great assistance to tourists, students, explorers in exploring various locations such as university campuses, theme parks, terrain topographic maps. This application is a two-tier client-server architecture. A paper map must firstly be registered on our website; here, we provide a side-by-side display of the registering paper map and Google map. The users are required to select at least three points on their paper map which correspond to another set of three points on Google Map. The pictorial gist of the paper map and the transformation matrix between coordinates of the two systems are stored in our server. At the client-side, when the users point the camera to a registered paper map, the app could track features on the map and use the stored transformation matrix to identify the users' exact location to be graphically displayed on the cell phone screen. Many applications could be added on top of this platform, e.g. tracking and directing pathways, displaying live updated information, warning hazards. Some will be further discussed in this article.