Web-based indoor positioning system using QR-codes as markers

Location tracking has been quite an important tool in our daily life. The outdoor location tracking can easily be supported by GPS. However, the technology of tracking smart device users indoor position is not at the same maturity level as outdoor tracking. AR technology could enable the tracking on users indoor location by scanning the AR marker with their smart devices. However, due to several limitations (capacity, error tolerance, etc.) AR markers are not widely adopted. Therefore, not serving as a good candidate to be a tracking marker. This paper carries out a research question whether QR code can replace the AR marker as the tracking marker to detect smart devices’ user indoor position. The paper has discussed the research question by researching the background of the QR code and AR technology. According to the research, QR code should be a suitable choice to implement as a tracking marker. Comparing to the AR marker, QR code has a better capacity, higher error tolerance, and widely adopted. Moreover, a web application has also been implemented as an experiment to support the research question. It utilized QR code as a tracking marker for AR technology which built a 3D model on the QR code. Hence, the position of the user can be estimated from the 3D model. This paper discusses the experiment result by comparing a pre-fixed target user’s position and real experiment position with three different QR code samples. The limitation of the experiment and improvement ideas have also been discussed in this paper. According to the experiment, the research question has being answered that a combination of QR code and AR technology could deliver a satisfying indoor location result in a smart device user

Novel thick-foam ferroelectret with engineered voids for energy harvesting applications

This work reports a novel thick-foam ferroelectret which is designed and engineered for energy harvesting applications. We fabricated this ferroelectret foam by mixing a chemical blowing agent with a polymer solution, then used heat treatment to activate the agent and create voids in the polymer foam. The dimensions of the foam, the density and size of voids can be well controlled in the fabrication process. Therefore, this ferroelectret can be engineered into optimized structure for energy harvesting applications