In my last post I introduced the project Point’N’Seek  and in this post I present the latest added functionality which I hinted at in my last blog of allowing users to augment the POI of interest with their own location and direction aware photographs. The following video shows this in operation and what is  particularly novel comes at the end when user can spatially search the photographs of a particular POI to obtain one from a specific direction.  The idea is that this could be used to make POI easier to find by pedestrians as the photograph they see would be from the direction the will be approaching it from. The example in the video is a photo of Infolab21 taken from a position NW of the buildingAn added bonus is that a database of such photographs could perhaps be stitched together to create a king of user generated Streetview perhaps using something like the Microsofts Photosyth image processing.

In the next stage of development we are planning to switch to Navteq Maps to allow us to fully explore orientation. Any other suggestions gratefully received.

In light of the advancing sensor support on the latest phones I decided to revitalise some of my work in LBS with my student Zhang Lei particularly around the old idea of geo-wands. Whilst many LBS present scenarios for users searching for Points of Interest (POI) that are proximate to the current location whereas geo-wands the commonly observed practice of horizon scanning in which users seek out interesting landmarks within their field of vision of direction of travel (often by pointing at them). This phenomenon is particularly prevalent amongst tourists who often scan their surrounding for interesting buildings or objects which they may then look up on a tourist map to find additional information. Point ‘n’ Seek facilitates this process through a novel gesture based control mechanism using on-board accelerometers and compass (as per the Navigator) enabling users simply point at the object the wish to have information about (compass provides rotational direction whilst accelerometers are used to provide distance control). Additionally Point ‘n’ Seek provides other user centred search facilities through its ‘Torchlight’ functionality where the region around the users or the object the user is pointing at is scanned by a search beam whose width is selectable by the use or alternatively a search beam is presented in the direction of the object/location the user is interested in as illustrated in the figure below.

Thus far we have implemented the software with control from the joy-pad and as yet the compass is the sticking point for the rotational control (anyone from Nokia reading this who can help please feel free to contact me). However, as the following video shows, the joypad solution still has obvious benefits in that it would work for non sensor enabled phones and we hope to get the full solution with more functionality going soon and i will blog again atthat time.