Campus Tour

COMP 523 Midterm Presentation

Justin, Paul, Florian

Overview/Motivation

• UNC Admissions Office would like to offer unguided campus tours to prospective students

• Idea: Use touch-sensitive tablet PC with GPS and wireless LAN– Display campus map with current location of user– Provide user with information on buildings, such as

history, purpose, available services, events taking place there

• Client: ITS – Technology Planning and Special Projects

Goals

• Display map on tablet PC• Display user’s current location on map• Show names of buildings• Show brief info on closest building(s)• Show detailed info in browser window when

clicking on building with stylus• Should be extensible to any kind of info (events,

multimedia etc.)• Allow for panning and zooming of map

(secondary)

Existing software

• iFIND– Developed by MIT (ifind.mit.edu)– Focus on social networking

General Approach

• Application is aware of location (GPS)• Uses location info to request relevant part of the

campus map• Data (e.g. map and building information) will be

loaded from server that is provided by the client• Data will be cached

– preload map area surrounding the user– allows operation without persistent internet

connection

• Programming language: Java

Hardware

• Target machine:Fujitsu P1610 Tablet PC– equipped with PCMCIA GPS card– wireless LAN– small and light (2.2 lbs)– touch-sensitive

• Development machine:– IBM X41 Tablet PC

User Interface

• Controls for– panning– adjusting location manually– zooming (not yet implemented)

• Map updated– When location changes (PlaceLab is polled

periodically)– When user pans, zooms or changes location

manually

• Java SWT

User Interface

Placelab/GPS

• PlaceLab– Software providing device positioning for

location-enhanced applications– Primary method: GPS– Uses radio beacons if GPS not available

(indoors)• Access points• GSM Cell phone towers• Fixed bluetooth devices

– This project: GPS only

Geospatial Information Systems (GIS)

• Geocoded data contains information about its coordinates (GPS position)

• For example:– building locations and extents– bus stops– voting districts– schools– http://www.co.orange.nc.us/gis/index.asp

Map Services

• Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards• Web Map Service (WMS)

- returns a map image (jpeg, png …) without data

- Web Feature Service (WFS)- returns GML (Geography Markup Language) data

about “Features” on map

• MapServer– Open source internet map server– Supports OGC standards– Provides the server side for client

Design

UI

Cache

MapCanvas

Map Manager

Paint

Mouse

PlaceLab

Net API

Details on the components

• Map Canvas – SWT Canvas– handles displaying the map and user’s location– mouse and paint listeners to handle map specific functions

• pan• zoom• launch browser with more building information

• Map Manager– converts GPS positions to image space– provides Map Canvas with image and location of user on image

• Net API– interacts with Mapserver– provides the map image (jpeg) and feature information on the

map

Web interface with client

• Mapserver provides WMS and WFS– request map with specified GPS extents– request features within this extent

• Servlet supplies detailed building data– Java properties provide a short description and URL

to multimedia content– request based on building number given by GIS

source– Handled by Content Management System (CMS) on

server side

To Do…

• Implemented so far:– UI with panning, adjusting location– Placelab stub for fake GPS coordinates– GPS to screen space conversion

• To do:– Display building feature information– Implement network layer– Acquire actual GPS coordinates– Caching of map and feature information– Zooming the map– Retrieve schedule information– Recommended path / Different tour types

Summary

• Interactive, location-aware campus tour

• Displays map with user location on it

• GPS to determine location

• Will use open standards to obtain map and info on nearby buildings using Mapserver

• Caching will be key to availability and performance