HaptiMap toolkit

HaptiMap is a high profile FP7 project to enhance the use and accessibility of mobile maps and location based services on mobile devices, through the integration of the tactile, audio and visual senses to augment applications when in non-ideal, noisy or poor-visibility situations. It provides an adaptable toolkit to aid developers in including accessibility functionality into, multi-modal mobile applications which can avail of a range of sensors, display and audio characteristics or externally attached devices. This is compatible with the major mobile platforms; Android, iOs, Windows and Symbian. The toolkit offers different ways of accessibly perceiving geographic data while presenting an infrastructure for acquiring such data from multiple sources. Over 23 HCI modules are provided for developers to ‘plug’ into applications. These are categorised by, core modules which provide low-level general functionality such as sensor data acquisition or geographical data coordinate transformations; mantle modules that provide the building blocks to create user interface components, such as the tactile compass or 3D map feature visualisation using OpenGL; and the crust (HCI) modules that comprise user interface components and advanced functionality built on the lower layers of the toolkit, such as the virtual observer or haptic guide.