Geographically Aware Walkie-Talkie for iPhones and iPod Touch

Abstract

People may want to know where their friends are with varios reasons. It may because of curiosity; or they want seeking help from friend because they are lost in some place; or for some reasons they want to keep tracking their friends‟ location. Imagine that there is a group of friends go to a theme park together; they may want to separate into subgroup to check out different place of the park, but still they may want to keep connected and where they are between subgroups. Locating current location using Global Positioning System (GPS) function on mobile devices and device-to-device communication through voice or text become usual applications on the mobile device. However on the market, this is rare to find an application integrating these elements: chatting with buddies using voice and/or text and locating him/her, together with other buddies, in an easy way, like showing on a virtual map. This project seeks solution to the inadequacy, an iPhone OS application, called “igVoice”, is implemented. In “igVoice”: It integrates three main functions, geographical location information from buddies, walkie-talkie liked functionality and instant text messenging. It uses Device-to-Device network connection using server-client architecture. Two different ways to trigger walkie-talkie function by pressing a button continously threshold-based automatic mechansim are implemented. “igVoice” uses the latest iPhone software development kit (SDK) 3.1. This application was developed using a Mac book and it was tested not only on the iPhone simulators, but also on real devices. In particular, we have successfully tested the system on both iPhone 3GS and iPod Touch 2nd generation over the WiFi. We believe that the system can also support 3G data network. The Bonjour protocol was employed in the project and the build-in location aware system like GPS and A-GPS of the iPhone 3Gs and iPod Touch are used together with the "mapkit" software library. The new AVAudioRecorder class avaliable in iPhone SDK3.1 and the low level audio queue are both tried for implementing walkie-talkie functionality in this project.