Photomap: Snap, Grab and Walk away with a "You Are Here" Map

One compelling scenario for the use of GPS enabled phones is support for navigation, e.g. enabling a user to glance down at the screen of her mobile phone in order to be reassured that she is indeed located where she thinks she is. While service based approaches to support such navigation tasks are becoming increasingly available – whereby a user downloads (for a fee) a relevant map of her current area onto her GPS enabled phone, the approach is often far from ideal. Typically, the user is unsure as to the cost of downloading the map (especially when she is in a foreign country) and such maps are highly generalised and may not match the user’s current activity and needs. For example, rather than requiring a standard map on a mobile device of the area, the user may simply require a map of a university campus with all departments or a map showing footpaths around the area in which she is currently trekking. Indeed, one will often see such specialised maps on public signs situated where they may be required (in a just–in–time sense) and it is interesting to consider how one might enable users to walk up to such situated signs and use their mobile phone to ‘take away’ the map presented in order to use it to assist their ongoing navigation activity. In this paper, we are interested in a subset of this problem space in which the user ‘grabs’ a map shown on a public display by taking a photograph of it and using it as a digital map on her mobile phone. We present two different scenarios for our new application called PhotoMaps: In the first one we are having full control on the map design process (e.g. we are able to place markers etc., in the second scenario we use the map as it is and appropriate it for further navigation use. .