Enhancing integrated indoor/outdoor mobility in a smart campus

Abstract

A Smart City relies on six key factors: Smart Governance, Smart People, Smart Economy, Smart Environment, Smart Living and Smart Mobility. This paper focuses on Smart Mobility by improving one of its key components: positioning. We developed and deployed a novel indoor positioning system (IPS) that is combined with an outdoor positioning system to support seamless indoor and outdoor navigation and wayfinding. The positioning system is implemented as a service in our broader cartography-based smart university platform, called SmartUJI, which centralizes access to a diverse collection of campus information and provides basic and complex services for the Universitat Jaume I (Spain), which serves as surrogate of a small city. Using our IPS and based on the SmartUJI services, we developed, deployed and evaluated two end-user mobile applications: the SmartUJI APP that allows users to obtain map-based information about the different facilities of the campus, and the SmartUJI AR that allows users to interact with the campus through an augmented reality interface. Students, university staff and visitors who tested the applications reported their usefulness in locating university facilities and generally improving spatial orientation.