Path planning in augmented reality indoor environments

Superimposing a virtual path onto a real indoor environment assists a person walking through a building towards a requested destination. With the release of AR toolkits for Android and Apple mobile devices and the availability of see-through head mounted displays, AR gains attention on the mass market. The main drawback of state-of-theart AR visualization devices is the small FOV. Keeping the calculated path inside the FOV of the AR visualization device is the novel approach introduced in this thesis. The path should adopt to the view direction of the mobile device; hence, a path is visualized to the user at all times. This thesis presents the design and implementation of the FOV assisted path planning algorithm. A 3D model of the indoor environment and tracking data of the user are applied to calculate the FOV assisted path. The FOV assisted path consists of a path inside and outside the FOV. The main focus of the work at hand is to calculate the path inside the FOV area and concatenate it to the path outside the FOV. Depending on the view direction, different path calculation stages and special cases are implemented and the resulting sub paths are concatenated. A performance analysis and a user study was conducted to assess the performance and usability of the implemented algorithm. Results indicate that the implemented path increases orientation of the user within the indoor environment when the direction towards the destination is unknown. Moreover, the usability of the FOV assisted path planning algorithm and the suitability of AR visualization devices for indoor navigation are assessed.