AR Navigation for Improving Social Networking

Md. Raihanul Islam Tayfur Coskun Frieder Pankratz

Chair for Augmented Reality Chair for Augmented Reality Chair for Augmented Reality
Technische Universitt Technische Universitt Technische Universitt
Mnchen Mnchen Mnchen
uniqueraihan007@mytum.de coskun@in.tum.de pankratz@in.tum.de
Andreas Dippon Gudrun Johanna Klinker
Chair for Augmented Reality Chair for Augmented Reality
Technische Universitt Technische Universitt
Mnchen Mnchen
dippona@in.tum.de klinker@in.tum.de

ABSTRACT opens up immense possibilities to revolutionize various fields

Augmented Reality (AR) has an enormous potential of chang- of work by providing new ways of interaction with our sur-
ing the way we interact with our surroundings. It enhances rounding environment, such as archaeology[3], architecture3
our perception and helps us to see, hear, and feel our en- and education4 .
vironments in new and enriched ways. Modern mobile de- This work explores the impact of AR technology in naviga-
vices, such as smartphones, are far more than a communi- tion and mobile social network applications. This paper de-
cation device. Technologies such as GPS, inertial sensors, scribes the design, implementation and evaluation of an AR
and cameras, allow to track the location of the user and the based pedestrian navigation application that improves social
orientation of the device itself. This can be further used to networking among users. It has been implemented in the
develop mobile navigation systems coupled with an AR view. context of the CRUMBS mobile social platform. CRUMBS
In the context of this study1 and the CRUMBS project2 , we enables users to consume multimedia social content stored
developed an AR based pedestrian navigation system. This in so called crumbs, which can be created by users and
system shows nearby social events and facilities created by stick to GPS positions. The application shows these crumbs
users. This paper presents the results of our user-centered and provides navigation towards them.
study of improving social networking using this system. It
also presents the result of a comparison between AR and 2. RELATED WORK
maps based navigation. Recent years have seen an increasing interest in social net-
works. Major players in this filed such as Facebook alone
1. INTRODUCTION has 1.11 billion active users at the moment5 . Many re-
AR has become a popular topic in academic research. A searchers have been working to integrate AR based naviga-
widely accepted definition of AR by Azuma is that, AR tion in various fields in order to improve user experience. A
allows the user to see the real world, with virtual objects classic example of such an application is the Feiner et al.[8]
superimposed upon or composited with the real world[7]. Touring Machine for exploring the urban area. It used
Therefore, AR supplements reality, rather than completely a head-tracked, see-through, headworn, 3D display, and an
replacing it. untracked, opaque, handheld, 2D display with stylus and
There are many applications of AR. The most well known trackpad for tracking and displaying information. It over-
application is present in major sports events, such as mo- laid POI on user headworn display and provide GPS based
torsport in which AR allows to show the current position, outdoor navigation. There were some limitations pointed
speed data and the name of a driver. Another application out by the authors such as the weight of the system was 40
is sailing competition, in which the country flags are digi- pounds, low brightness of the headworn display and quality
tally overlayed on the respective boat. Apart from this, AR of tracking due to satellite signals.
Tsai et al.[9] have developed an AR based training system
1
This work was supported by the European CELTIC project for mobile devices which trains people to escape in nuclear
CRUMBS CP7-003 and funded by BMWi. accidents. This system is helpful for the design of various
2
http://crumbs.tid.es/ other training programs in accident and emergency manage-
ment. The authors have carried out a comparative study be-
tween AR and electronic map based escape guidelines and
found that users using electronic map required more time
and had a lower success rate in the escape than AR based
guidelines. They concluded that AR based navigation would
3
http://www.designmena.com/inspiration/augmented-
reality-ar-part-architecture-design
Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). 4
AA 2014, April 27, 2014, Toronto, Canada. http://www.prweb.com/releases/2011/10/prweb8899908.htm
5
. http://investor.fb.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=761090
be an alternative method for enhancing the efficiency of var- A junaio plugin application with specific channel id is in-
ious training programs. However they suggested that AR stalled on an Android device. The Android client loads the
based navigation guidelines should supplement the paper specific channel from the junaio backend server. The server
based training materials, rather than replace them. This verifies the channel and loads the corresponding data from
is because mobile phones may have limitations or are out of the content server. The data include POI generation files,
service in extreme situations, such as nuclear accidents. logic files and multimedia contents. There are two location
Narzt et al.[4] developed INSTAR system, a indoor and based channels hosted on the junaio backend server. The
outdoor navigation framework that focused on pervasive track- client, backend and content server communicate with each
ing data acquisition and the mobility aspect of navigation other using junaio web API.
devices. The kernel of INSTAR was portable to different
navigational devices and therefore, could be used as car as 4. PROTOTYPE IMPLEMENTATION
well as pedestrian navigation system.
The application implementation follows the client-server
Lautenschlager[2] developed an AR campus navigation
model. The client implementation is a junaio plugin ap-
system for the University of Calgary. The system helps stu-
plication for the Android platform and has been registered
dents to find buildings and rooms on the campus and also
at the metaio developer portal. The server implementation
provides pedestrian navigation assistance. It has support for
consists of two junaio channels registered on the junaio back-
both indoor and outdoor navigation with limitations as he
end server: Maps Navigation Channel and AR Navigation
suggested. One such limitation is that it cannot determine
Channel. The former provides Google Maps navigation and
the orientation of the device during indoor location track-
the latter provides AR navigation.
ing. Also, it can only show Points Of Interest (POI) within
the campus and thus can not be used outside of the campus.
He considers this as the major drawback of the system. The
system is only limited to display some hard coded POIs due
to lack of information of POIs in the university database.
As the main focus of the work was to create a navigation
system, it does not address social networking aspects that
may occur within a university campus environment, such as
students communicate with each other to organize a group
study or to go to lunch together at the university cafeteria. (a) CRUMBS AR View (b) AR Navigation
One application that is related very closely is called Wik-
itude Navigation6 . It is an AR based GPS navigation sys-
Figure 2: Application screenshots
tem with precise turn-by-turn directions overlaid onto a real
world image. It has support for both pedestrian and car nav-
igation. In addition to display navigation, Wikitude Naviga- CRUMBS AR View
tion also informs users of their surrounding POIs. However
it does not focus on the social networking aspects such as The AR view of crumbs is the entry point to the application.
creating social events, viewing participants list of an event, It shows all available crumbs on the browser as shown in
etc. Figure 2(a). The radar on the top right corner on the screen
shows all available crumbs as individual dots on it. Both
AR and Maps Navigation Channel start with this GUI. The
3. SYSTEM DESIGN CONCEPTS drop-down list on the top left corner of the screen is used
The purpose of our developed prototype application is to to switch between channels. Tapping on a crumb shows its
provide an AR view of CRUMBS events around a user and details.
provide AR and Google Maps navigation to enable users to
reach to these CRUMBS events. The application is built AR Navigation
around metaio SDK API and junaio API/plugin7 and uses The navigation is visualized using a radar and arrow mark-
built-in GPS and inertial sensors based tracking of metaio ers as shown in Figure 2(b). A 3D arrow is rendered on
SDK. Two location based channels have been created for each GPS point and also added to the radar. Each arrow
the application. Both the channels provide an AR view of is represented as a yellow dot on the radar. Both of these
available crumbs. Additionally one channel provides the AR metaphors provide visual guidance to reach a destination.
navigation and the other channel provides the Google Maps
navigation to reach to these crumbs. The channel content is
provided by a hosting server.
5. USER-CENTERED EVALUATION
An experiment was carried out to evaluate the developed
application. The experiment was set up as a within-subjects
design in which all participants are exposed to every testing
condition. This experiment design has been chosen to draw
a fair conclusion with a limited number of participants and
resources. The experiment started with a short briefing to
the participants about what AR is and how the application
Figure 1: System architecture uses AR to provide visual navigation aids to find people or
places. After this introduction, all participants had to per-
6
http://www.wikitude.com/showcase/wikitude-navigation/ form a sequence of actions to test AR and maps navigation
7
metaio Developer Portal: http://dev.metaio.com/ to reach an assigned location.
 In total, 15 people (1 female) took part in the evaluation.
They were all university graduate students from different
faculties and their ages ranged from 20 to 30. All partic-
ipants had experience with the use of smartphones. Each
participant took part in one of three groups. A specific sce-
nario was assigned to each group. An example scenario was
to navigate to a crumbs event from a location using AR
based pedestrian navigation and come back to the start-
ing location using maps based pedestrian navigation. Two
groups carried out the assigned task during the day and one
group at night. Experiment data have been gathered during
the evaluation process for further processing.

5.1 Questionnaire
Evaluation questionnaires are adopted to do both quanti-
tative and qualitative assessment of the application and the
concept. Two set of questionnaires were used. One set is
based on the standard System Usability Scale (SUS) ques-
tionnaire[5] for measuring the usability and learnability of
the application. The other set focuses on the social net-
working aspects and the comparison between two types of
navigations. Both the questionnaires used a five-level likert
scale, ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree
and are represented as 1 to 5 on the scale respectively. The Figure 4: Results of subjective assessment
likert scale is based on forced choice questions, where a state-
ment is made and the participant then indicates the degree
of agreement or disagreement with the statement. The result of the subjective assessment is shown in Figure
4. The x-axis represents the questionnaire and the y-axis
5.2 Results represents the scale. The figure shows that the median of
The application has the mean SUS score of 71.67. The re- the data set for the questionnaire is 4.
sult of the SUS evaluation is shown in Figure 3. The x-axis Q1 in Figure 4 shows that AR navigation makes it easy to
represents SUS questionnaire and the y-axis represents the find people/events. While Q2 shows that most participants
SUS scale. The graph shows that odd numbered questions found the navigation visualization user friendly. Two navi-
(i.e. Q1, Q3, Q5, Q7,and Q9) have high scale values and gation metaphors exist in the application, radar and arrow.
the median of these dataset is around 4 in the SUS scale. Participants were asked to choose between these two based
Whereas even numbered questions (i.e. Q2, Q4, Q6, Q8 and on their user experience. Q3 shows that most participants
Q10) have low scale values and the median of these dataset preferred radar over arrow.
is around 1 in the SUS scale except Q6. This indicates a The application provides both AR navigation and maps
positive result, since the odd numbered questions scale val- navigation. The maps navigation implementation uses the
ues positively affect the SUS score, i.e the higher the scale Google Maps navigation. The participants were asked to
values of odd items the better the SUS score. Whereas even choose between AR navigation and maps navigation after
numbered questions scale values negatively affect the SUS using both of them. Result of Q4 in Figure 4 shows that
score, i.e. the higher the scale values of even items the less most participants preferred AR navigation over maps nav-
the SUS score. igation. Similarly 80% of the participants said that they
prefer to join social events when AR navigation is available
to them as represented by Q5. The results of Q6 show that
more than 50% of the participants found that AR navigation
improves social networking.

6. DISCUSSION
The analysis of results of the quantitative data is pre-
sented in the following subsections.

6.1 Usability
The SUS measure perceives ease-of-use of an application.
Recent research shows that it also provides a global mea-
sure of system satisfaction and sub-scales of usability and
learnability[6].
Bangor et al.[1] have done 2324 surveys and came up with
an average SUS score of 71.14. They also claim that a system
is good if its score is above 70 and better if its score is in
Figure 3: Results of SUS evaluation[5] the high 70s to upper 80s. Exceptional systems get score
above 90. The average SUS score of the implemented AR
navigation application is 71.67. This is slightly higher than cles, such as buildings or vehicles in front of the user. Also
the average SUS score of 71.14. Therefore, the application the mobile camera is only capable of showing limited sur-
has a tendency towards a good and easy to use system. rounding area. Therefore, maps navigation can be added as
a navigation metaphor on certain part of the AR navigation
6.2 Improve social networking interface in order to give user a broader view of surrounding
One of the goals of this paper is to find out whether AR area.
navigation makes it easy for people to find other people or However, this research focuses only on outdoor pedestrian
events. The participants had been asked about it and the navigation. Therefore it can be extended to include driving
results represented by Q1 in Figure 4 show that nearly all and bicycle navigation scenarios as well. Also an addition
participants said that AR navigation makes it easy to find of indoor navigation capability to the developed navigation
people or events around them. application will make it more interesting and useful. In-
The main goal of this paper is to find out if the AR naviga- door navigation can be particularly helpful for large indoor
tion feature can help in improving social networking among places such as an airport or a university campus, where out-
people. Consequently, the participants were asked during door navigation does not work. It will enable users to in-
the evaluation about their preference to join social events teract within these places as well. Furthermore, integration
when AR navigation is provided to them. They were also to other social networking platforms such as Facebook and
asked if they found that AR navigation improves social net- Google+ will enable users to share their activities with their
working. The results of these two questions are represented existing social networks. Once these features are integrated,
by Q5 and Q6 in Figure 4 respectively. The results show another user study with more participants will be carried
that more than 75% of the participants would prefer to join out.
social events when AR navigation is provided to them and
the rest were not sure about it. 8. REFERENCES
Figure 4 also shows that more than half of the partici-
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