Knowing where you are – handling GPS

In this section, we will look at one of the major approaches for mobile AR and sensor-based AR (see Chapter 1, Augmented Reality Concepts and Tools), which uses global tracking. Global tracking refers to tracking in a global reference frame (world coordinate system), which can encompass the whole earth. We will first look at the position aspect, and then the location sensor built on your phone that will be used for AR. We will learn how to retrieve information from it using the Android API and will integrate its position information into JME.

GPS and GNSS

So we need to track the position of the user to know where he/she is located in the real world. While we say we track the user, handheld AR applications actually track the position of the device.

Note

User tracking versus device tracking

To create a fully-immersive AR application, you ideally need to know where the device is, where the body of the user in reference to the device is, and where the eyes...