NavigatAR: An Augmented Reality Indoor Navigation System

Indoor navigation remains a challenge in large enclosed environments such as university campuses, hospitals, and corporate complexes where GPS signals are unreliable. This paper presents NavigatAR, a lightweight augmented reality-based indoor navigation system designed for smart campus environments. The system utilizes Apple’s ARKit framework to overlay real-time three-dimensional directional guidance onto the user’s physical surroundings, enabling intuitive turn-by-turn navigation without requiring dedicated infrastructure. NavigatAR employs an anchor-referenced graph-based model where navigation nodes are defined relative to a stable spatial origin, and optimal paths are computed using Dijkstra’s shortest-path algorithm. To improve spatial consistency across sessions, an optional QR-code-based localization mechanism is integrated to reduce drift in visual-inertial tracking. Experimental evaluation conducted in a multi-storey academic building demonstrated a 100% task completion rate, an 18% reduction in navigation time compared to traditional floor maps, and path computation latency below 3 milliseconds. The results indicate that NavigatAR provides a scalable, cost-effective, and practical solution for indoor navigation in resource-constrained environments.