High-precision identification of contextual information in location-aware engineering applications

1474-0346/$ see front matter 2009 Elsevier Ltd. A doi:10.1016/j.aei.2009.04.002 * Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 734 764 4325; fax E-mail addresses: [email protected] (H.M. Khou Kamat). 1 Tel.: +1 734 764 4325; fax: +1 734 764 4292. This paper presents research that investigated algorithms for high-precision identification of contextual information in location-aware engineering applications. The primary contribution of the presented work is the design and implementation of a dynamic user-viewpoint tracking scheme in which mobile users’ spatial context is defined not only by their position (i.e., location), but also by their three-dimensional head orientation (i.e., line of sight). This allows the identification of objects and artifacts visible in a mobile user’s field of view with much higher accuracy than was possible by tracking position alone. For outdoor applications, a georeferencing based algorithm has been developed using the Global Positioning System (GPS) and magnetic orientation tracking devices [5] to track a user’s dynamic viewpoint. For indoor applications, this study explored the applicability of wireless technologies, in particular Indoor GPS, for dynamic user position tracking in situations where GPS is unavailable. The objectives of this paper are to describe the details of the three-stage-algorithm that has been designed and implemented, and to demonstrate the extent to which positioning technologies such as GPS and Indoor GPS can be used together with high-precision orientation trackers to accurately interpret the fully-qualified spatial context of a mobile user in challenging environments such as those found on construction sites. The obtained results highlight the potential of using location-aware technologies for rapidly identifying and retrieving contextual information in engineering applications. 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.