deSCribe: A Personalized Tour Guide and Navigational Assistant

Mobile phones have become ubiquitous in daily life. They are also becoming more powerful with more computation and a variety of sensors embedded in them. We have built deSCribe, a context-aware phone-based navigational aid. The application provides turn-by-turn directions from the user’s current location to a requested destination. It provides information about the surroundings by processing the images taken by the camera on the phone. It enables a novel user interface with the ability of using the phone as a remote to point at buildings to get further information about a particular floor within the building. Lastly, the application uses user feedback to control how much information is presented to the user.