Augmented Reality Navigation brings home First Prize in European Satellite Navigation Competition 2010

For its revolutionary navigation system Wikitude Drive, which uses augmented reality to superimpose driving directions over live street video on smartphones, the Salzburg start-up Mobilizy took home the €20,000 grand prize in the European Satellite Navigation Competition 2010. Wikitude Drive also won the prize for the best application leveraging EGNOS, the European augmentation system that aims to add even more speed, precision, and reliability to GPS.

This evening, the best innovations and applications in satellite navigation were awarded in the Allerheiligenhofkirche of the Munich Residenz in what was already the seventh iteration of the European Satellite Navigation Competition. Bavarian Minister of Economic Affairs Martin Zeil was on hand to recognise the overall winner, as well as the winners that were selected for each of the 23 ESNC partner regions from a record-setting 357 total submissions. In addition, high-ranking representatives from the European GNSS Supervisory Authority (GSA), the European Space Agency (ESA), the German Aerospace Center (DLR), ESNC industry partners T-Systems and NAVTEQ, and Forum SatNav MIT BW awarded special prizes in a series of specific topics. For the first time, this year’s competition also included accolades for students and the three best applications suitable for testing and realisation at one of the 220 nodes of the European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL).

The 2010 overall winner, Wikitude Drive, is the world’s first lightweight, fully functional, turn-by-turn mobile navigation system to use augmented reality (AR) in combination with global maps to superimpose directions onto a live smartphone video stream of the driver’s surroundings. He or she can thus easily recognise and follow the suggested route based on real-world imagery instead of abstract maps.

Although Wikitude Drive works very well with the GPS system available today, the missing absolute accuracy of GPS makes it impossible to fully superimpose driving directions onto real streets. "By integrating EGNOS – the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service – this application will really take off with improved accuracy, faster positioning signals, and more accurate altitude detection," said Mrs. Heike Wieland, Acting Executive Director of the European GNSS Supervisory Authority (GSA), who presented the prize for the best EGNOS application to Mobilizy. "I am curious to see how augmented reality will revolutionise the market for pedestrian and in-car navigation," Mrs. Wieland added, believing in the commercial success of the application scheduled to launch for Android smartphones in the coming weeks.

Second place in the overall running went to Helmut Drewes of the Agrista company (Oberpfaffenhofen), for an online platform that uses remote sensing data to help farmers gain access to investors and increase food production levels. Meanwhile, Patrick Henkel and Patryk Jurkowski of the Technische Universität München won third place for a carrier phase receiver system that features extremely reliable integer ambiguity resolution. Taking home fourth place were Jakob Jakobson and his team from the National Space Institute of the Technical University of Denmark for a system that facilitates fast access to defibrillators in cases of sudden cardiac arrest.

Here you can download an overview of all of the winning innovations. Images of the Awards Ceremony will be downloadable here from 19 October, with further visual material on the individual winners and their ideas available by request.

19 October will also bring you the chance to meet all of this year’s winners in person at the European Satellite Navigation Conference. Throughout the day, innovators from all over the world will introduce their business ideas in the field of satellite navigation. The versatility of this field is reflected in the six topic blocks covered: security-critical applications, road solutions, public & social services, high-precision applications, location-based services, and earth observation & environment. The complete conference programme is available here.