Section: Software

Interactive eXtensible Engine (IXE)

Participants : Yohan Lasorsa, Jacques Lemordant, David Liodenot, Thibaud Michel, Mathieu Razafimahazo.

GPS navigation systems when used in an urban environment are limited in precision and can only give instructions at the level of the street and not of the sidewalk. GPS is limited to outdoor navigation and requires some delicate transitioning system when switching to another positioning system to perform indoor navigation.

IXE is an open source urban pedestrian navigation system based on Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) and running on mobile phones with onboard geographic data and a routing engine. With IXE, the distinction between indoor and outdoor is blurred as an IMU-based location engine can run indoor and outdoor. IXE allows augmented reality queries on customized embedded geographical data. Queries on route nodes or POIs, on ways and relations are predefined for efficiency and quality of information.

Following the web paradigm, IXE is a browser for XML documents describing navigation networks: by using the micro-format concept, one can define inside OpenStreetMap a complex format for pedestrian navigation networks allowing navigation at the level of sidewalks or corridors. The big advantage of doing this instead of defining new XML languages is that we can use the standard OpenStreetMap editor JOSM to create navigation networks in a short amount of time.

The purpose of the IXE browser is to read these OSM documents and to generate from them visible or audible navigation information. IXE works on any mobile phone running under iOS or Android. Its heart is composed of three engines, one for dead-reckoning navigation, one for interactive audio and the last one for Augmented Reality visual information, allowing quick reconfiguration for extremely varied applications.

IXE can be used for accessible navigation allowing independent living for people with disabilities.