Building an indoor 3-D map on the spot, via smartphone
The view from the basement laboratory is breathtaking.
Not the one out the tiny windows of the half-underground office. It’s on a smartphone that computer science Prof. Stergios Roumeliotis is using while walking around the University of Minnesota’s Walter Library.
On the screen, a three-dimensional map of a nearby hallway has taken shape. The map was made by holding the smartphone’s camera while moving. The camera and the phone’s motion sensor worked together to create a grid of data points that became a 3-D image.
It’s a radical new ability for smartphones and promises to enable consumers to create 3-D maps on the fly. The software development is being handled by U grad students who are funded by $1.35 million grant from Google Inc. The work is part of the company’s recently announced Project Tango, a cellphone optimized for 3-D mapping.
“We will soon be able to get smartphone directions for how to go from one place to another in a building, such as how to go from the entrance to my classroom,” Roumeliotis said.
In addition, homeowners could use the software to create a virtual tour of their houses before putting them up for sale, Roumeliotis said. While the software is being designed to work on a prototype of the new Google smartphone, it will also work on existing smartphones.
One of the key features of the University of Minnesota software is that it creates a map almost instantly without slowing down the phone’s other operations or drawing much battery power, Roumeliotis said.
“We’re on the frontier of this kind of mapping,” Roumeliotis said. “You could map the inside of the Mall of America today using a computing center with a lot of processing power and a lot of time. Our plan is to do that on a cellphone in almost real time, with the time lag getting smaller and smaller.”
Vocabulary Focus
breathtaking adj.
extremely good, beautiful or exciting
underground adj.
below the surface of the earth; below ground
taken shape idiom
to start to develop a more clear or certain form
optimize v.
to make something as good or effective as possible
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