Project: Mobile augmented reality for tourists - a showcase project to enter a new dimension of interactive mobile technology.

The aim of the project MARFT is to demonstrate the possibilities of augmented reality with mass market mobile phones/PDAs, which will have enough computing power to render a 3D-world on their display in real-time, MARFT is setting out to launch an interactive service for tourists visiting a dedicated region in Upper Styria. Visiting tourists will be able to test a smart phone with MARFT-software running on the device. During local tours through the mountainous region, they will be able to watch the horizon by pointing the lens of the smart-phone camera towards the point of interest. As soon as the frame covers the area of interest, the tourist will be able to choose between augmented objects laid over the actual picture on the screen of the smart phone, and a virtual reality view of the same landscape with the augmented objects mentioned before. This choice will be given for the case, that the view is obstructed by clouds or other obstacles. The virtual 3D-view will be rendered locally on the mobile platform; therefore it will be a fast, nearly real-time user experience. The point of interests appearing on the augmented layer will be categorized and context-sensitive. The innovation will be the local rendering of the 3D-landscape, whereby the altitude model and the geo-coded areal-photos as well as the POIs [point of interest] will be pulled through the mobile network from a server. The POI-objects will be hyperlinked to additional information such as hiking trails or snack-chalet and others. Future OS [operating system] of mobile phones, such as Android will permit all applications to work seamlessly together, therefore a hyperlinked telephone number can be dialed instantly through a simple double-click. To demonstrate the wide field of possible applications, it is also indented to find one more interactive application based on the a.m. technology, which uses the touch-screen UI [user interface] to input important information by the user for a community of users. One example would be a snow patrol, which keeps track of dangerous avalanches and marks them by simple pointing his mobile phone camera towards the concerned slope. A view minutes later, interested skiers could be warned through their mobile, just because they entered a geo-fenced area. They could be pointed by their mobile phone to the dangerous avalanche area._x000D__x000D_To describe the business model it is important to point out, that we don’t intend to compete with the market leaders of geo-referenced information providers through different mobile application, such as google’s Streetview3 application. There are and will be many such applications for urban areas and the competition will be severe. On the other hand there will be market niches such as rural information provision, such as tourist services to provide them with rich information about their whereabouts. Theses niches are not interesting enough to be provided from a global system provider. Therefore we plan to market our application and service through two different sales channels, firstly thru a national mobile phone carrier company, such as 3G Hutchinson and secondly cooperation with local tourist associations. For both channels, cooperation talks have started already._x000D__x000D_The project consortium will consist of C.C.COM GMBH a leading Austrian Software company, who has solid research and development experience in the field of Telematics and Software life cycle services, they are specialized in rapid prototyping and fast solution implementation on the very latest underlying technologies, such as mobile devices and participated in many national and international R&D programs. As well as MOVIQUITY, Spain. Their aim is to COtain themselves at the leading edge of emerging technologies and related applications, MOVIQUITY has been participating in EU R&D Programmes since 2001. This enables the company to acquire the latest know-how, as well as to keep close track of advanced technologies and their trends, which in turn enables MOVIQUITY to provide its customers with the most innovative and appropriate solutions. The experts at JOANNEUM RESEARCH have many years of experience in image analysis for mobile location based services, such as in successful EU funded projects, video interpretation for mobile mapping systems, and multisensor based solutions for mobile services. Using the technologies for advanced image analysis, such as extraction of informative features for image recognition, the condition of our environment can be comprehensively recorded and monitored on the basis of these data. Innovative methods of visualisation and animation are used to depict complex spatial relationships and to design multimedia information systems._x000D_

Acronym MARFT (Reference Number: 4802)
Duration 01/12/2009 - 28/02/2013
Project Topic The future of mobile phones has finally arrived at graphic capabilities and integrated sensor classes, that augmented reality applications previously only known to desktop PC computing power, are now beginning to shift onto mobile phone platforms.
Project Results
(after finalisation)
The results of the project comprises several fields of advanced computing blocks:_x000D__x000D_1. A fully reusable and portable 3D-Rendering Engine, implemented on the Android platform. The Engine is written in native code and thus portable to all OSs with support for OpenGL2.0ES._x000D_2. A beyond state-of-the-art vision algorithm optimized for mobile systems, such as Android Platform to determine/extract/compare and correct the tolerance of Smartphone positioning sensors. The shortcoming of current augmented-reality-apps has therefore solved by this technology._x000D_3. A Demonstration APP on the Android market to demonstrate potential user and industries the capability of the MARFT system._x000D_4. A complete backend for preparation and aggregation of necessary Geo-Data for the MARFT Demonstrator._x000D_5. A complete backend for linking to major social networks.
Network Eurostars
Call Eurostars Cut-Off 2

Project partner

Number Name Role Country
3 Apif Moviquity S.A. Partner Spain
3 C.C.COM Andersen und Moser GmbH Coordinator Austria
3 Joanneum Research Forschungsgesellschaft mbH Partner Austria