Evaluation of Mobile Augmented Reality for Indoor Navigation

Abstract: In the last three years, several advanced toolkits for developing mobile augmented reality applications have been released. This in combination with the increased computational power of commercially available mobile devices has led to a great surge of attention given to the development of such applications. Currently, most mobile augmented reality applications being developed are within the gaming category. In this study, one of the less popular use cases, indoor navigation, were explored. An initial literature study was carried out followed by the development of a prototype which were then evaluated through different usability tests. During the tests, the test subjects navigated partly with the use of the prototype and partly with traditional navigational aids present in the shopping mall where the testing took place. The test subjects navigated 28% faster on average when using the prototype and felt that it was more intuitive. Different negative aspects were, however, also observed such as a decreased awareness of their surroundings. In the end, mobile augmented reality was deemed to have great potential when used in the context of indoor navigation even though some technical challenges would likely need to be solved before widespread adoption could take place.