Augmented Reality to Support Situational Awareness in Wireless Sensor-Enabled Environments

Situational Awareness (SA) means having an understanding of one’s environment with respect to the task at hand. Visitors in large buildings like shopping malls, hospitals and university campuses sometimes get overwhelmed trying to comprehend their surroundings. These places generally have physical signs placed to aid visitors, but these signs are often not enough on their own. In this paper we treat the problem of a lack of SA inside large buildings. This is achieved by creating an android app that uses Augmented Reality (AR) content to enhance the user’s on-site experience. Beyond indoor navigation, the proposed AR interface can be extended to visualize real-time data from wireless sensor networks deployed for infrastructure monitoring applications, such as pipeline monitoring systems. Heriot Watt University-Dubai old campus is selected as the case study environment. An image tracking AR library and another location based framework are used in the system implementation. The chosen AR system utilizes a marker-less approach to tracking; hence no additional markers have to be placed in the user’s environment for the system to operate. Usability tests and target detection performance experiments are conducted to support the potential and feasibility of this system. This work encompasses the 9th United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) by focusing on making situation awarness more resilient and enhancing its technological capabilities.