Location Based Advertisements And Indoor Navigation System For Shopping Malls (Research)

Project Name : Location Based Advertisements And Indoor Navigation System For Shopping Malls

Duration : 8 Months

My Contribution : 1. Android App
                                      2. Web Service 
                                      3. Staircases Patterns 

This was our final year research project. There were four members in our group. In this project we were focusing on indoor navigation and make it use in practical way. Based on that idea we were able to developed the Location based advertisements system for indoor environment.

My team. ( From Left - Thilina , Krishantha, My self and Chathura  )

Advertising is one of the most innovative concept present in our society today. It helps to keep the consumers informed about whatever new products or services that are available in the market at their disposal and to spread awareness about products or services that are of some use to consumer and potential buyers. The main aim of advertising, many believe is to sell. These are the kind of people who vehemently oppose anything that make advertising seem unethical. Advertising on the whole helps business as well as the economy to prosper and makes the consumer aware of the various choices that are available to him. Although the concept is pictured over different aspects, currently in places like shopping malls they use the same conventional ways of displaying advertisements. In this project we introduce a novel concept of delivering location based advertisements to hand held devices reside in large shopping malls while navigating the user to particular shops they chose to visit.

Modern researches over indoor navigation systems has gained a fresh impetus over last couple of years, making indoor spaces and indispensable part of current geospatial research. Navigational applications are one of the booming industries, focusing more and more on the indoor world. Even though there are number of researches took place using various technologies, none of these has been developed and distributed to consumers.

Therefore through this project we hope to build up a “Location Based Advertisements and Navigation System for Shopping Malls”, a self –contained , map-based, indoor navigation and advertisement system Making use of hand held devices with motion (accelerometers) and rotation(gyroscopes) sensors to continuously calculate their motion and position. All the sensing and computing technologies we accurately localize user’s route, and provide turn by turn instructions to their destination.

Location based Advertisements

System Diagram

There are several QR codes placed in each entry at every floor of the shopping mall.When user is entering to the shopping mall he can read those QR using his mobile. In the QR we stored the position of the user. Therefore after read the QR code we know the current place of the user meanwhile the app will star to track the user movements using the sensors.

In the map we have defined several regions. Each region contain 2-3 shops. So the user will get the advertisements corresponding to the region he is in. So where are advertisements coming from ? Those advertisements coming from the application server. The shop owners of the shop can feed their advertisements into our system using the web interface we provided to them.

Simply the location based ads process is this.
1. Shop owner feed advertisements to the system
2. Those advertisements stored in application server
3. When user in the shopping mall the advertisements will send to his mobile based on location

Home Page 

Register Shop Owner

Upload Advertisements

Random Advertisements, Search Advertisements & More... 

Not only in the shopping mall our app can be used even you're at home. When you're at home the app will show you advertisements which are selected randomly. If you like particular advertisement you can add them to your favorite list. If you want to find a advertisement , there is a search function which allow you to find your advertisement fast. If you want to view advertisements that are belong to particular category, for that you can view the advertisements by category. 

Demonstration 
To be more realistic we used this app for a shopping mall in Sri Lanka which is called as Majestic City.

For the demonstration we selected simple area of MC and draw our map. In below video you can see how the app is working.