Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
of all the above usually have a lot more functionality and allow the developer to
annotate locations with more than just text messages.
The main objectives of this project were to investigate the two proposed
presentation modalities and implement a prototype for each of them. In this article
we will present those prototypes then demonstrate the different options available to
users interacting with a spatiotemporal annotation application. Both prototypes are
capable of storing and presenting the annotations at a particular location. These
two prototypes are the first step towards increasing user interaction between the
virtual and real environments.
1.3 The System History
The original system was designed and developed in 2009 as a student project in the
area of converged, next generation telecommunication networks (NGNs), called
Next generation networks Virtual Stickies (NVS). The front-end used Google
Android OS 1.5 and the back-end was an integrated IP Multimedia Subsystem
(IMS) location based service (LBS). The latest version uses web services and the
Google Application Engine as the back end, named Virtual Stickies. We use the
Android OS Location Service to obtain the GPS readings from the smartphone
built-in GPS unit, and Google Maps for map view augmentations. As there were
no AR libraries available at the time, and none of the current AR toolkits support
Android 1.5, all the tools were developed in house.
The current system is used in a number of research projects. One is used to
provide users with the ability to introduce 3D objects, another is focused on audio-
based annotations. Accuracy and efficient placement of digital annotations is an
open research question, and projects on these topics are undertaken in our group.
2 Aim and Scope
2.1 Aim
The main goal of these studies is to investigate various technological challenges
related to the process of generation and consumption of spatiotemporal informa-
tion. In particular, we are interested in social media and user-generated content in
the context of mobile geographical information systems (mGIS).
The object or information to be stored can be anything from a small text
message to a video, sound recording, picture or a virtual 3D model. Every object
has metadata associated with itself. In the current version of the system, each
object also has an expiry date, a radius, a username and a location attached to it.
