Organizing and presenting geospatial tags in location-based augmented reality

Recent improvements in the capabilities of smart phones are making the location-based augmented reality services a reality. When widely used, such a system is expected to produce many user-created geospatial tags concentrated at popular and important sites. In this paper, we describe a way to organize and group such geospatial tags (manually or automatically using a nearest neighbor algorithm) and how to efficiently interact to search and find the tag that the user might be interested in. The proposed method was implemented on an Apple iPhone, and an experiment was carried out to verify the improved usability. The results do indicate the advantage of the principle of hierarchical organization of data. We also further found that the "automatic-but-less-accurate" approach is more suitable than "precise-but-manual" due to the dynamic nature of the mobile interaction and less than perfect sensing.