As posted a few months ago, Matthew Lape and I were given the opportunity to work on KLAS, the Kingsbury Location Awareness System. With the help of Professor Andrew Kun as our adviser and Oskar Palinko as a source of valuable insight, we were able to create a simple navigation application and tour guide application using the Project54 framework as our software development platform. While the work is still in progress, here are some of the results of our summer work.
Taking a look at KLAS, there are primarily two software components: the location determination application and the user-interactive applications. I will briefly describe the user-interactive applications while Matt will discuss the location determination side of things in another post. KLAS is a location awareness system that utilizes IEEE 802.11 RSSI readings to obtain a user’s location. This location information can be useful in various applications. The applications we decided to focus on for KLAS is a tour guide application and the navigation application.
This is an example of the map display in the KLAS Navigation application. The PDA on the left depicts what a user will see if they are in the shaded orange region. The arrow is the direction the user needs to go. If the user follows the arrow, the image on the right PDA will be shown. The right PDA image depicts where the user is currently and shows how to get to the destination.
This is an example of the Tour Guide application for KLAS. The image on the left depicts where the user is currently (somewhere in the shaded orange region) and a selected room (in red) that the user wishes to learn more information about. The user can cycle through nearby rooms to learn more information about it.
The image on the PDA on the right is shown if the user selects the “Room Info” button in the left image. Currently, the room number, the occupants, and some information about the room and occupant is given. The user can also cycle through the rooms in this screen and also press “Map” to navigate back to the map display.
As we continue to work on this, we plan on playing a lot more with the GUI and using Project54′s SUI as well. We hope to perform some user studies and experiments with different methods of pedestrian navigation and also conveying information. Stay tuned for some more information about KLAS brought to you by Matthew Lape!
Mark Taipan
2 comments
oszkar says:
October 13, 2008 at 5:26 pm (UTC -4)
Thank you for -finally- recognizing my input in the project. Wasn’t my insight in the first draft “invaluable” compared to “valuable” as it now stands?
Seriously, very nice project. Congrats to both Mark and Matt.
marktaipan says:
October 14, 2008 at 1:07 pm (UTC -4)
Thanks Oskar! It indeed is ‘invaluable’ to have you around and as long as you don’t mind, Matt and I will pester you with more questions now that you’re here longer. Thanks!