If you always get lost in museums or malls, you'll love 3D indoor navigation
BARCELONA — We all use mapping apps to get from one location to another when we're outside, but we could soon use them for indoor navigation, too.
At Mobile World Congress on Monday, I got to experience for myself how indoor navigation works with a Project Tango device. (Google's Project Tango is supposed to help our phones and tablets better understand the 3D world we live in.)
Lenovo invited reporters out to the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya for demos. I was expecting to see the final — or a near-final — version of the Project Tango smartphone the company announced at CES, but nope.
Instead, Lenovo used old prototype Tango tablets to show how to navigate from one room to another.
With the tablet held up in my hands, I started my tour looking at a map of the various rooms on the floor. Creating a navigation route was as simple as tapping on a room and setting it as the destination.
A squiggly line then showed the indoor path from my location to the destination. I felt like a kid again following this path through the rooms. If I veered off the path, my location dot also veered off; the tracking was very precise and I didn't notice any lag in tracking when I moved freely around the room.
If I wanted to, I could also tap on a button to turn on an augmented reality first-person perspective view. The app switches on the cameras and constantly scans the room, while overlaying a path of dots for you to follow.
Project Tango
Using the augmented reality view for indoor navigation.
Project Tango reps told me it'll be very easy for developers to create floor plans quickly and getting indoor navigation up and running requires very little coding work.
Once I made it to my desired room, I could then touch the location marker on the screen to bring up a panel with more information on an artist or the artworks inside. Tapping on the play button brought up a slideshow of paintings with an audio summary. Tapping on the play button brought up a slideshow of paintings with an audio summary.
Meanwhile, selecting the AR button activated the Tango tablet's 3D-sensing cameras. With the augmented reality feature on, I could walk up to specific paintings and tap on them to get additional information. On one particularly large painting with many different faces, the app used facial recognition to keep track of all of them; I tapped their faces to bring up more factoids on that specific person.
None of these features are particularly groundbreaking; the Louvre has been using Nintendo 3DS handhelds as interactive guides for years. Though I've never seen anyone use a 3DS as a guide in the few times I've been to the Louvre, you can if you want to.
The museum demo may seem niche, but imagine applying this kind of indoor navigation for use in a huge shopping mall or in an indoor parking lot. We'd never get lost anywhere ever again.