Heterogeneous information integration for mountain augmented reality mobile apps

Mobile Augmented Reality (AR) applications offer a new way to promote the collection of geo-referenced information, by engaging citizens in a useful experience and encouraging them to gather environment data, such as images of plant species or of mountain snow coverage. The distinctive characteristic of mobile AR applications is the overlay of information directly on top of what the user sees, based on the user’s context estimated from the device sensors. The application analyzes the sensor readings (GPS position, phone orientation and motion, and possibly also the camera frame content), to understand what the user is watching and enriches the view with contextual information. Developing mobile AR applications poses several challenges related to the acquisition, selection, transmission and display of information, which gets more demanding in mountain applications where usage without Internet connectivity is a strong requirement. This paper discusses the experience of a real world mobile AR application for mountain exploration, which can be used to crowdsource the collection of mountain images for environmental purposes, such as the analysis of snow coverage for water availability prediction and the monitoring of plant diseases.