Help
Overview
How to use SINLA?
First, in order to use SINLA you have to install it from the Android Market. If you run it, the first thing you will see is the main menu, it gives you a choice between “Navigate”, “Preferences” and “Help”. The “Help” button redirects you to this website, you are currently on. By hitting the “Preferences” button, SINLA offers you three different types of view. At the first start of the application, SINLA selects randomly one view type for you. The currently active view type is marked as light Gray. Try out the other two types, to find your favourite! After choosing your type of view, you are back in the main menu and by selecting the “Navigate” button; you are ready to start your Augmented Reality experience. Please note, due to hardware restrictions, you will always need to have a good GPS signal and internet connectivity, otherwise nothing will happen.
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Since the navigational mode is started, SINLA will load the MegaViewPortable OpenGL Engine which renders the 3D graphics directly on the camera viewfinder. This screen always appears on changes of its environment, for example a change in position for more than 200 meters, a new search request, or when changed the search radius. A new search request can simply be made by touching the screen or using the physical keyboard. The soft-keyboard automatically appears if the text-field has been touched. Using the device's "back" knop or the "done" button just closes the soft-keyboard. A touch gesture outside of the text-field will start the search request, whereas the text-field disappears and the screen will be refreshed. The entered text will be committed to the Google-Maps API, which delivers a maximum of 10 points of interest. Since an object enters a range of +/-5° in the cameras view of field center, it will be marked and some information about it will be displayed at the top of the screen. If there are to few or to many results you can adjust your search range by using the trackball (up and down scrolling). The range can be adjusted from 0,1km upto 10km. Then just press the trackball to lock it so that SINLA can load the appropriate data.
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About the evaluation
The evaluation is part of a scientific research project, which investigate the use of special graphics which represents objects out of sight. For this SINLA collects informations about the times of use for different view types. Further it asks for some demographic data, so that an overall favorite view type can be identified. At no time there will be an automatic data transfer, so the user has to do this by hand.
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Data privacy
There are some data which are stored and processed by the SINLA application. The stored data are mainly the history of searched terms for the autocomplete functionality. But this never will be transmitted to anyone. Besides that there are the times the users used every view type. Further if the user will acknowledge to take part at the evaluation, some anonymous demographic will be transmitted. And what is more, to distinguish results a unique hash of the device id will be added. This hash can not be used to identify the user afterwards.