Even after so much advancement in technology, is it not sad that we cannot navigate inside a covered space or a building? Have you never felt lost at an airport or a hospital? In my opinion, it is quite sad that not much work has been done in developing indoor navigation systems.
This prompted me to find solutions. Since I am working in virtual reality, I thought of making use of it to develop solutions for indoor navigation. As I progressed in this field, I found many more valuable solutions, which can be augmented to indoor navigation.
I was working on Virtual Tours. In these tours, we create a photo geometric model of a building or place and add navigation options. Since we use real panoramic photographs, this model is true representation of the real property. Using the navigation options, users can move through the property at their will and controls. While embedding data into these tours, I came across the idea of indoor navigation. These tours can be used as indoor navigation tools. I created one sample and I think it worked well. All the navigation is available in the form of real visuals of the property.
Since these tours work on mobiles, users can use them for indoor navigation purpose while they are at the property. They can as well use them for offline navigation as virtual tours, to know details about the property.
I did a bit of research and found out hardware solutions to track the location and movements of users inside a covered space. I am now working towards creating an interface between this hardware and my tours. When done, my tours would pick the location of users and change visuals accordingly. As users navigate through a property, visuals would keep changing, matching the location, and users would be guided visually to reach their desired location.
I also created options for locating a person’s location in the building. Likewise, I provided options to perform a procedure associated with the property.
In extended uses of these tours, I created disaster management services, which can be used both by rescue agencies and users.
To summarise, my virtual tours can be used for Visual Navigation, Procedural Navigation, Indoor Navigation and Disaster Management.