Sharing information of three-dimensional geographic locations through mobile devices

Abstract

People who travel to a place may not know well about the information of the sites. Fortunately, people may have a personal device such as a mobile phone which has a digital camera and broadband wireless accesses, and the device can serve as a convenient equipment to access the information of geographic locations when people visit the place. This paper presents a system, called the GLOBE (GLobe On moBiIE), consisting of a mobile, a client and a server. The GLOBE mobile is a mobile phone equipped with GPS, height, direction, angle sensors which are used to estimate the three-dimensional (3D) geographic location on the earth of the objects in the photo. The GLOBE client and server can manage these photos with 3D location information, annotate the objects on the photo, associate the information and travel notes with the photos, and share their photos with people on the Internet. Therefore, people just use the GLOBE mobile to take a picture on the object that they feel interested during a trip, and can immediately obtain the information of the object by searching on the GLOBE server. The proposed system helps people to learn information behind sites and objects they visited, and helps users to manage and share the information during a trip.