Looking for a solution for a safe home Duc Hanh (Ba Dinh district, Hanoi) said: “My wife is pregnant with our second child, so when building a house, I choose green and safe materials for the interior space. Increasing the health protection feature is a priority criterion, because my family not only has pregnant women and small children but also elderly mothers living together. Families want to choose green materials for a safe living space. The story of Anh Hanh’s house building is not only about drawings, designs, costs … but he also focuses on learning about indoor harmful gases and how to solve them. Assoc. Prof. Dr. Tran Ngoc Quang – Lecturer in Microclimate – Built Environment, Faculty of Environmental Engineering, University of Civil Engineering – said: “Formaldehyde gas accounts for the largest proportion of volatile organic gases. harmful vapors (VOCs) in the home. It arises from daily activities such as cooking, from cleaning products that use chemicals to carpets, furniture, laminate floors … “. According to recent epidemiological studies, formaldehyde is one of the most carcinogenic gases in the home. Formaldehyde gas easily evaporates and exists in the air, so it is easy to contact people through the eyes, skin, nose, throat and cause respiratory diseases. Protect living space with “Vinh Tuong Super Protection” ceiling Architects believe that homeowners can choose proactive health protection solutions from the time they plan to build or renovate their home to reduce the amount of formaldehyde. That is to use interior finishing materials that emit little or no VOCs (a type of volatile organic compounds). This method helps to reduce the source of formaldehyde emissions in the home. In addition, a prominent product has just been introduced by Saint-Gobain, France, which has the ability to purify harmful formaldehyde gas – “Vinh Tuong Super Protection”. Video – Mechanism of air purification of the ceiling ‘Vinh Tuong Super Protection’ Housing space directly affects the quality of life of the family. An ideal living space with fresh air will help the whole family feel comfortable and always want to return. Thanks to the sheet core component applied with exclusive Activ Air technology, the “Vinh Tuong Super Protection” ceiling has the function of actively sensing, identifying and absorbing indoor harmful gas (formaldehyde), then converting the harmful gas. into an inert gas that is not harmful to health. This process is repeated continuously and lasts up to 50 years. According to the certification from the world’s leading environmental testing organization Eurofins, “Vinh Tuong Super Protection” plaster ceiling has the ability to purify formaldehyde gas up to 85%, 5% higher than the standards of other countries. Europe. Ceiling “Vinh Tuong Super Protection” provides an active formaldehyde gas purification solution for up to 50 years. In addition to the intelligent function of actively purifying harmful gases, the plaster ceiling “Vinh Tuong Super Protection” also possesses other features such as anti-sagging, anti-cracking, fire resistance, outstanding moisture resistance, making the house durable. and safer. Readers can sign up for the “Vinh Tuong Super Protection” ceiling upgrade privilege package for free up to 100 m2 for a safer living space, applicable to the first 200 houses. https://qrco.de/zingnews

Chamomile: Chamomile plants are great for purifying indoor air. This beautiful flower plant helps to purify ammonia and other toxic gases in the air. However, you should take care to keep out of reach of children and pets, as chamomile can cause poisoning if ingested. Red Banyan Tree: The red banyan tree, an evergreen variety native to India, is excellent in removing toxic gases such as formaldehyde or carbon monoxide from the air. This plant also helps your home or office have a pleasant scent. Bodhi tree: The almond tree, or spider tree, is also an indoor plant with excellent air purification. The advantage of this plant is that they are easy to take care of and do not cause poisoning, so you can place them anywhere in the house. Ivy: The ivy just helps to add cool green to the indoor space, while also helping to remove harmful gases. This plant can live both outdoors and in no sunlight. Fern: The fern not only helps to purify harmful substances such as formaldehyde from the air, but also acts as a humidifier thanks to its rapid evaporation rate. Gerbera trees: Gerbera trees from South Africa are the ideal ornamental plants to place indoors if you want to both purify the air and adorn the house with colorful colors. Madagascar Hemorrhoid: The Madagascar Hemorrhagic Tree, or dragon tree, is a suitable ornamental plant located in the sun and high humidity. This plant will help keep the air in your home fresh and clean. Rhizophora: Rhizophora is a small bonsai, you can completely put them on your desk or indoor drinking table to purify the air. Royal orchid: Royal orchid not only adds elegant beauty to your home, but also helps remove all pollutants from your home atmosphere. Queen betel nut tree: The betel nut tree king has both great cleaning effects and beautifies your home space with bright green and crimson colors. Aloe vera: Aloe vera: In addition to its health and beauty benefits, it also removes benzene, formaldehyde and detergent byproducts from the air in your home. Tiger’s Tongue: Tiger’s tongue helps remove harmful gases such as benzene, formaldehyde, trichlorethylene, xylene, and toluene from your home space. Guanyin is a bonsai that is suitable for direct sunlight. This indoor bonsai helps to purify the air from harmful gases such as ammonia, carbon dioxide, formaldehyde and xylene. Seedlings: Plant that removes formaldehyde, xylene, and toluene from the air. However, you should be careful to keep the plant out of the reach of domestic pets, as this can cause poisoning for pets. Endowed Tree: A rich tree is an easy-to-care ornamental plant, which helps remove toxic gases and dust from the air, and increases indoor air humidity.

Chrysanthemum: According to the Healthline, NASA research determined this flower has the ability to purify the air. It is found to be highly effective at removing ammonia, benzene, formaldehyde and xylene from indoor air. Image: Inspireflowers. Gerbera: This is a beautiful flower with many different colors. Gerbera has a high rate of evaporation and the ability to effectively clean indoor air. It removes chemicals such as benzene from the air. Exposure to benzene has been linked to leukemia, and the chemical can get into your home from car smoke, glue smoke, solvents, paints, and art supplies. Image: Coadyflorist. Tulips: This lovely flower comes in many different colors. They also work to keep the air clean. The reason is that they have been shown to be effective in removing formaldehyde, xylene and ammonia from the air. Image: Aliexpress. Lavender: This flower has a very pleasant scent, helping you to fall asleep easily. Although lavender is usually an outdoor plant, you can grow it in your bedroom if you keep it exposed to sunlight. Just plant it in a pot that is large enough and not too soggy. Image: Essexproperty. Anthuriums (Anthurium): This plant belongs to the araceae family of plants, native to Colombia and Ecuador. A heart-shaped rose, shiny green leaves and beautiful flowers last several months after blooming. It is effective in cleaning formaldehyde, ammonia, xylene and toluene from the air. Image: Crocus. Dendrobium orchids: This is a flower grown indoors that is adapted to all different environments. That is one of the reasons they are so popular and so easy to maintain. Dendrobium orchids are characteristic white or purple, growing in rows on the trunk. This flower is effective in removing xylene and toluene from the air. Image: Tvgazeta. Thu Hai Road: This is also a beautiful plant with some vibrant colors that can bloom all year round if the conditions are right. They also help remove chemicals from the air. Image: Gardenknowhow.

The Salem house project was built in Thu Dau Mot city, Binh Duong province. The house is for a young couple and their first daughter is only four years old. Architect Story Architecture said that the work pressure and childcare pressure of the young couple in modern society is very great, so they need to design a well-ventilated house with lots of trees. This home will bring a feeling of relaxation, relieve pressure after a working day. In addition, there are also many playgrounds for girls to play, explore nature by themselves, and release energy. At the same time, parents will have more private time. Salem house has an area of ​​125 m², located in Thu Dau Mot City, Binh Duong Province. To create a feeling of lightness for the house, the architect uses white as the main color tone and blends gray and wood colors to make the house more elegant. The simple and neatly designed interior items also help the space to be wider and more airy. One of the baby’s play spaces The house offers a relaxing feeling and relieves the pressure after a working day. KTS Story Architecture does not use a partition between the kitchen and the backyard to create an interesting spatial connection. Therefore, when cooking or eating, homeowners feel as comfortable as in a garden restaurant. The corridor connects the two rooms to break the feeling of being bored by the handrail’s railing. The architect creates a green patch to cover the railing and make use of it as a playground for the baby. The backyard garden is also a place to play and relax for parents. The backyard and the kitchen were not separated by any partitions. The main color tone of the house is white and gray Large skylights placed in the middle and back of the house help get natural light and wind for the bedrooms. Bedroom walls with large glass panels overlooking the skylight and green areas help homeowners relax more when in the room. The architect designed two skylights in the middle and the back of the house. This skylight provides natural light and wind for the bedrooms on the second floor. Between floors, the architect arranged more playgrounds for children. Sunlight reflected from the skylight through the hallway leads to another space that makes the path more interesting. From the bedroom, the owner through the large glass overlooking the sky to relax while in the room. Simple bedroom, fully functional.

Smart things (public account: zhidxcom)

Author |Xiong Dabao

Edit |Li Shuiqing

Smart Things reported on April 15 that Google recently announced the launch of AR indoor navigation function, which provides users with route guidance in scenarios such as airports, transit stations and shopping centers, and helps users find the nearest elevators and escalators, boarding gates, and platforms , Baggage claim, boarding counter, ticket office, restroom, ATM, etc.

This AR indoor navigation technology breaks through the limitations of traditional indoor navigation of flatness and low legibility, enhances image accuracy and data versatility, and not only brings users a novel and personalized experience of indoor navigation, but also provides offline navigation. Industries such as retail bring potential application value.

This article will analyze AR indoor navigation from three aspects: AR’s breakthrough in the legibility of indoor navigation maps, the transformation of AR navigation from outdoor to indoor, and the development prospects of AR indoor navigation.

1. AR breakthrough in indoor navigation: two-dimensional leap to three-dimensional, and map legibility is improved

Based on AR indoor navigation, the user’s own location and floor can be identified, and then AR overlay guidance such as arrows and information markers can be used to reach the destination.

Although these instructions seem simple, they cannot be achieved by previous indoor navigation methods such as indoor maps, Bluetooth beacon positioning, Wi-Fi signal positioning, and GPS positioning.

Indoor map is the most traditional one, such as the retrieval map of the library bookshelf. This method collects a large amount of data and makes an index map, and readers can navigate and find through the exclusive number of each book. However, the production and expression of maps for large-scale indoor environments is costly, and its universality is not high.

The Bluetooth beacon location method is more popular. Relying on Bluetooth, the smart phone software can roughly get the user’s location on the map for route planning and navigation. However, due to the short transmission distance of Bluetooth, it will have extremely high deployment and maintenance costs in large indoor environments such as shopping malls and office buildings.

Another solution is to locate and navigate based on Wi-Fi signals. However, due to the complexity of the indoor environment, Wi-Fi signals are easily changed by environmental changes, so maintenance costs are still high, and accuracy is also restricted by factors such as Wi-Fi router deployment density, environmental stability, and training duration.

Although the GPS positioning method is widely used, it has poor signal penetration and low positioning accuracy. It is only suitable for two-dimensional planes. It can determine the approximate location of the user but cannot determine the direction. It cannot play a role in large-scale buildings.

▲The GPS signal bounces off the facade of the building

The AR indoor navigation launched by Google this time is equipped with a new visual positioning system (Visual Positioning System; VPS), which can make up for the deficiencies of the above methods.

Google AR indoor navigation function (Indoor Live View) relies on VPS technology to determine the user’s indoor location, and combines the virtual route with the actual indoor scene through visual processing.

The visual positioning system VPS is different from GPS. It does not rely on signals for positioning, but on images.

First, engineers can create localized maps through VPS. This method is called simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). By taking a series of images with known locations and analyzing visual features, VPS can create maps and establish fast search indexes, such as buildings, bridges, etc.

Secondly, when the user needs indoor navigation and positioning, the VPS will match the camera lens view with the VPS index view, and use the mobile phone’s built-in inertial measurement unit (IMU) data such as the camera, gyroscope, accelerator, and gravity sensor to use motion Artificial intelligence algorithms such as tracking and environmental perception are compared and analyzed to determine the location and direction of the mobile phone user relative to the real world.

Finally, in terms of orientation presentation, VPS can superimpose label effects such as guidance arrows and subtitle information onto the real images collected by the camera in real time, and rely on light estimation technology to better integrate virtual content into the real world. The light estimation technology allows the mobile phone camera to perceive the current environment’s lighting conditions and perform color correction on the virtual image, thereby enhancing the sense of reality when the virtual and real images are combined.

2. The indoor transformation of AR navigation: the improvement of image accuracy and data versatility

Since 2019, Google has launched the AR navigation function (Live View). Relying on the VPS visual positioning system and Google Street View gallery, it helps users to obtain accurate navigation routes outdoors. In subsequent updates, users can also identify surrounding landmarks through AR navigation, allowing users to know their location in the city more clearly.

How difficult is it to go from outdoor navigation to indoor navigation?

Large-scale indoor scenes such as exhibition halls, museums, shopping malls, and transportation hubs are complex and large in scale, and there are many areas of untextured space and visual ambiguity. The collection, production and expression of map data is a major difficulty. At the same time, with changes in lighting and viewpoints, it is also a challenge for users to accurately and quickly relocate. Google has many technological breakthroughs.

The first technological breakthrough is the improvement of image accuracy. More than 10 years ago, Google began to introduce street view maps, where users can have a “human eye view” map browsing experience, but at first these street view data were not localized. Image data localization can add more annotative label information to pictures of objects, locations, etc., to help users quickly understand.

In order to use VPS to achieve global localization, Google uses information collected and tested from more than 93 countries around the world to connect it with Street View data. This rich data set provides trillions of powerful reference points through triangulation to help people more accurately determine the location of devices and guide people to their destinations.

▲Google triangulation method to accurately locate buildings

Although this method works well in theory, there are still challenges in practice. The problem is that the real-time image of the mobile phone may be different from the scene when the street view is collected during localization. For example, the details of trees will change with the seasons, or even with the magnitude of the wind, and a good match cannot be obtained.

In order to break through this technology, Google uses machine learning to filter images of temporary and changeable things in the scene, focusing on images of fixed structures in the scene. This technological advancement also makes today’s AR indoor navigation more accurate.

Another technological breakthrough is the rapid acquisition of data.

Airports, shopping malls, hospitals… The numerous buildings mean that Google needs to shoot a large number of indoor images of public scenes. In the previous outdoor street view database construction, Google has gradually improved its image collection methods from early street view vehicles, street view tricycles, street view trolleys, and then to the convenient and lightweight street view backpack (Trekker).

▲The old street view backpack on the left and the new one on the right

Below the street view backpack is the main body of the backpack, and the top is a spherical device equipped with 15 5 million pixel cameras. With this kind of backpack, image collectors can take pictures of corners where cars can’t get in.

As a result, in the image collection of indoor public scenes, Google can use its own street view backpack to send a large number of contractors through an airport, station or shopping mall in a certain place to quickly capture VPS data.

Google said that AR indoor navigation will first be launched in some shopping malls in Chicago, Long Island, New York, Los Angeles, Newark, New Jersey, San Francisco, San Jose, California and Seattle. In the coming months, it will also be launched at airports, shopping malls and transit stations in Tokyo and Zurich.

However, there are still some weak links in the development of AR indoor navigation, such as focusing on product development and landing but insufficient understanding of users and functional requirements, map information expression pursuing visualization and realistic effects but lacking purpose and rationality, and related hardware for presentation applications. Development is lagging behind and so on.

3. The development prospects of AR indoor navigation: scene expansion, use increase, equipment extension

At present, AR indoor navigation technology is accelerating its development. In addition to Google, domestic Baidu and AutoNavi are also exploring technology research and development and application scenarios.

Take Baidu as an example:

In November 2016, Baidu launched the AR walking navigation function. The navigation interface includes elements such as compass, route, turn indicator, way point and destination bubble, roller guidance enhancement, route overview, etc., with voice reminders to enhance the user’s walking navigation experience. In April 2017, Baidu added “Tutu”, an AR navigation cartoon character, to enhance the fun of AR guidance through big-eyed cute objects. In December 2020, Baidu Maps and Baidu Brain DuMix AR-visual positioning service platform launched the AR indoor navigation function-AI indoor communication.

AI indoor communication provides users with high-precision 6DoF positioning capabilities through visual positioning and augmenting service (VPAS). VPAS technology uses image-based 3D reconstruction technology to construct high-precision geometric maps of shopping malls, and then uses scene understanding algorithms and 3D vision positioning algorithms to calculate the user’s accurate location in real time. The actual position accuracy can reach 1 meter in the actual complex environment. Currently, scenes such as Beijing Qinghe Wanxianghui, Beijing Shuang’an Shopping Center, and Shanghai 2049 Emerald Park Shopping Center have been launched. At the same time, the technology can also be used in scenarios such as industrial inspections and logistics sorting.

Although AutoNavi and Sogou are relatively mature in outdoor walking AR navigation and in-vehicle navigation technology, they have not yet found their involvement in AR indoor navigation.

In addition to major map factories, SenseTime is also exploring AR indoor navigation. The SenseMARS Mars Mixed Reality Platform of SenseMARS, jointly built by Zhejiang University-Shangtang Technology 3D Vision Joint Laboratory and SenseTime Product Team, uses sparse point cloud map technology to reconstruct high-precision 3D maps, and calculates the current device’s 6DoF pose through IMU sensors. , Combined with SLAM technology to achieve indoor accurate positioning and AR navigation.

In the future, relying on the development of AI and IoT technologies, AR indoor navigation will allow users to see the digital attributes of the physical space, such as store virtual signs, promotional information, number of people in the mall, store traffic and other real-time information. Users can perceive in real time whether restaurants need to queue up and which products are on sale in trendy stores through their mobile phones. At the same time, combined with user portraits, AR indoor navigation will bring users a personalized offline scene experience. In terms of AR presentation, indoor navigation devices will also be expanded from mobile phones to AR glasses, AR headsets and other hardware to solve the dizziness and eye fatigue caused by mobile phones displaying AR maps for users.

It is worth mentioning that the report “Virtual (Augmented) Reality White Paper 2021” of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology stated that AR relying on Inside-out technology is becoming more mature, and tracking and positioning will present integrated vision cameras, IMU inertial devices, depth cameras, event cameras, etc. The development trend of multi-sensor fusion. AR indoor navigation will develop well with the joint participation of the industry and academia.

Conclusion: AR indoor navigationWill become a new trend in the development of the industry

In terms of the manifestation of maps, AR technology has unparalleled advantages in the integration of people, maps, and the environment. Therefore, when Google launches AR indoor navigation, to a certain extent, it may set off a new trend in the development of AR indoor navigation at home and abroad.

It can be seen from the layout of big map manufacturers such as Baidu, AutoNavi, and Sogou that Baidu is one step ahead, launching AR indoor navigation functions in some shopping malls in Beijing, Shanghai, Guizhou, Langfang and other places, and will continue to make efforts in this field in the future. . Gaode Maps followed closely, and has upgraded the AR walking navigation function this year, and may soon enter the exploration of indoor scenes.

In the current industrial Internet era, AR indoor navigation will, with the support of AI and IoT technologies, activate the space utilization rate of large indoor scenes, broaden industry boundaries, and bring more possibilities to many smart industries. We look forward to the full coverage of all indoor public scenes in the world by AR navigation in the future.

source:Ars Technica, Google Blog, Code Swift,CNKI, Baidu