The Beacon Südtirol - Alto Adige project (https://beacon.bz.it/project/) developed a hardware and software Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructure for the South Tyrol Province. The project deployed 3.500 beacons, small Bluetooth devices that, by providing a unique identifier, enable the development of mobile applications that can offer localized and contextual services. The developed infrastructure, which is available as open source, is used to develop added value services for the region. Suggesto is developing a new mobile app for the Centro Trevi that exploits beacons to support visitors to access and use the services of the center. One of the implemented tool is to precisely drive visitors searching for a specific publications, to the floor, room, and shelf where the sought book is located using Augmented Reality techniques. Beacons enable the application to localize the user within the center. Augmented Reality markers are used to precisely locate the user and the smartphone in the space. Indications over impressed on the camera view indicate the correct path to follow. During the talk, we will demonstrate the App and discuss the major technical issues we had to solve; finally we will present the first user evaluation results.

1. The TREVILAB App
Beacon AR Indoor Navigation Mobile Tool
Adriano Venturini
adrianoventurini@suggesto.it
Dario Cavada
dariocavada@suggesto.it
SUGGESTO SRL
www.suggesto.eu
info@suggesto.it

2. CONTENTS
● The TREVILAB
● Objectives of the App
● Supported scenarios
● Beacons for indoor navigation
● AR for indoor navigation
● Software architecture

3. THE TREVILAB
Cultural Center of the Province of Bozen
Wide range of national,
international and local
borrowable books
South Tyrolean authors
Researches about territory
Presentations and
workshops
Specialized library for
the promotion of
languages
self-learning materials
online courses, DVDs,
CDs
It offers about 20.000
titles of art films and
cultural
documentaries for
experts and film lovers
TreviLab offers fully
equipped spaces
(“Labs”) for structured
and continuous
activities

4. THE TREVILAB APP
Informs about the scheduled events at the
Center and in the Bozen Province
Allows visitors to search for books and DVDs
available in the libraries of the TreviLab
Informs visitors about the services of the
TreviLab center
Guides visitors through the spaces of the center

5. THE SEARCH AND INDOOR NAVIGATION SCENARIO
1. A visitor can search a desired publication in any of the
libraries of the Center
2. It provides information on the publication found and if it
is available for borrowing
3. Guides the visitor to the floor, the room, and the shelf
where the item is located by using:
a. a Map or
b. Augmented Reality indications

6. BOOKDETAILS
SEARCHFORABOOK
SEETHEPATHONTHEMAP
THE SEARCH SCENARIO

7. GUIDE THE USER
CHECKPATHONTHEMAP
AUGMENTEDREALITYINTHEROOM
CHANGEFLOOR

8. SEARCH AND INDOOR NAVIGATION SCENARIO - CHALLENGES TO TACKLE
1. Fully represent the spaces of the Center (three floors)
2. Assign the exact position of the publications on the
libraries (floor, room, shelf)
3. Locate the visitor in the Center, with sufficient precision
4. Compute the path
5. Show the path (on the map and on AR)

9. ARCHITECTURE
CLOUD
Open Data Hub
Events
Aleph
Books Catalogue
Mongo DB
Server
Business Logic
API
Rest
App Mapper
TreviLab App
Backoffice WebApp
Maps books to the shelves
App for TreviLab users
CMS and MAP management

10. MAP THE SPACES - THE MAPPER TOOL
LAYERS OF
THE MAP:
● rooms
● walls
● pois
● furniture
(shelves)

11. MAP BOOKS ON THE SHELVES- THE APPMAPPER
1. Scan the shelf 2. Scan the book 3. The book is
on the shelf

12. LOCATE THE VISITOR - BEACONS
A Beacon is a small wireless device
transmitting a continuous radio signal.
The signal is detected by a SmartPhone via
Bluetooth Smart (BLE).
The signal tells your smart device “I’m here” by
giving its ID number
UUID / RSSI
Major & Minor
UUID / RSSI
Major & Minor

13. LOCATE THE VISITOR - BEACONS INSTALLED IN THE TREVILAB
about 70 beacons
installed on the three
floors of TREVILAB

14. TESTED ALGORITHMS
● CLOSEST BEACON
○ It uses the average of the RSSI emission power over a period of time.
Got the one with the highest value.
● TRIANGULATION
○ It uses the signals of the beacons with known position and calculates the
trilateration. Unluckily, the results were very disappointing in terms of quality.
● FINGERPRINT
○ the footprint of the beacon signals in the different locations of the TREVILAB is
collected.
○ The position of the user is the one with the closest pattern to the collected ones.
○ Disadvantage: long times for recording positions and accuracy is not good
enough compared to time for data collection.

15. COMPUTE THE PATH - SHOW THE PATH ON THE MAP
A layer with route points has been
added to the map.
Each point is connected to the
possible other points.
To calculate the route, the Dijkstra's
Shortest Path Algorithm was used.

16. SHOW THE PATH WITH Augmented Reality (AR)
The AR visualization algorithm:
calculates the path using the the
Dijkstra's Shortest Path Algorithm
(2d) and plotting it in 3D using a
marker as a reference point
(Anchor point).
Your position
AR Marker (Anchor point)
Path
Destination
AR View

17. Flutter is Google’s UI toolkit for building beautiful, natively compiled applications for mobile, web,
and desktop from a single codebase. Dart is the programming language used to code Flutter apps.
Fast development
Flutter's hot reload helps you
quickly and easily experiment, build
UIs, add features, and fix bugs
faster.
Expressive, beautiful UIs
Material Design and Cupertino
(iOS-flavor) widgets, rich motion
APIs, smooth natural scrolling, and
platform awareness.
Native Performance
Flutter’s widgets incorporate all
critical platform differences such as
scrolling, navigation, icons and
fonts to provide full native
performance on both iOS and
Android.

18. OPEN SOURCE COMPONENTS
Server
Liferay Enterprise CMS
NodeJS Data ingestion
MongoDB Database
WebApp
Vue Javascript framework
Vuetify Javascript UI for VUE
Leaflet and Leaflet plugins Map viewer and editor

19. OPEN SOURCE COMPONENTS
App
Flutter Google cross platform framework
Flutter Libraries https://pub.dev/
beacons_plugin Scan nearby iBeacons
arkit_plugin ARKit - Apple's augmented reality (AR)
arcore_flutter_plugin ARCore - Android augmented reality (AR)
flutter_map
map_controller
… and many others

20. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Commissioned the App; provided expertise and access to their
library information system
Open Data Hub platform
Beacon Alto Adige Project

21. The TREVILAB App
Beacon AR Indoor Navigation Mobile Tool
Adriano Venturini
adrianoventurini@suggesto.it
Dario Cavada
dariocavada@suggesto.it
SUGGESTO SRL
www.suggesto.eu
info@suggesto.it