Transição entre ambientes externos e internos e visualização adaptativa

The development of applications for mobile devices has not only kept up with their growing usage but also the technological advances that are associated with them. Nowadays, mobile devices come equipped with sensors that allow the creation of applications that enhance their usage, effectively giving information visualization an increasingly important role within these. In this field we include the applications that, by using sensors that allow the calculation of the user’s geographical position with some degree of precision, show the users relevant information concerning the physical spaces or events in their surrounding area. However, there are still some challenges in the field of information visualization in mobile devices. In the context of geo-referenced information, as mentioned above, the determination of the geographical position of the user is especially important to provide information based in the user’s context. In the last years the focus of the research in the area of context adaptive applications, and in particular the visualization applications, has been localization contexts involving external environments. However, the exploration of visualization solutions based in localization contexts in internal environments and the transition between those environments is a new area of research. The goal of this project is to propose solutions so as to potentiate the design of applications for adaptive visualization in mixed environments that involve augmented reality scenarios. To mitigate the existing problems a development platform for mobile applications in augmented reality scenarios, named RUBI, was conceived and an application has been developed from this platform has a proof of concept. The determination of the geographical position of the user, in an internal context, will be addressed through Pedestrian Dead Reckoning techniques. The adaptation to the context of its use will be a key feature to mitigate the limitation presented in usability, usage and information visualization in small screens