The presentation will be a range of wide area AR applications for different use cases, in cities (real estate, city planning, city info) as well as industries (construction, renovation, facility maintenance). As special topic, I’ll discuss how augmented Social Media can be taken further to industrial applications, for capturing tacit knowledge among maintenance workers. Technical topics include 3D tracking in wide area applications, enabling facility asset management and interaction with BIM and further links to enterprise systems.
Dr. Charles Woodward (VTT) Wide Area AR for Cities
1.
2. Augmented Reality at VTT
Overview
VTT is the 3rd largest research institute in Europe, over 2,400 employees
AR / 3D Tracking team established in 2001, now 25 people in Espoo & Tampere
Leading edge tracking technology: ALVAR SDK
World first in various application fields
Application focus
Industrial maintenance and training
Wide area applications in buildings and cities
Architecture, Engineering & Construction (AEC)
3. Markerless 3D Tracking
Point cloud based tracking
Point clouds created from photos
Enabling fast, accurate, robust tracking
Automatic initialization without user interaction
Sensor fusion, extended tracking
Tracking targets
Unity based AR authoring: tracking targets and content
Several optimizations, number of points, outliers, lighting etc.
Updating of point clouds: based on user taken photos, or robots
Wide areas: dynamic loading of point clouds, edge cloud servers
4. AR for Buildings
Facility management
Building life cycle services: maintenance, operation & repair
Mobile AR interaction with facility’s digital information systems
Example: Building maintenance
Building Information Model (BIM) as framework to digital systems
E.g. Facility Maintenance System, Building Automation, IoT
Example: Construction / renovation
Mobile AR view and interaction with BIM based production plans
Checking for daily work tasks, resources, schedules, etc.
5. AR Social Media
Linking real world objects to Social Media
Attach hashtags and social media posts to real-world objects
Create target objects by taking one or more reference image(s)
Objects are recognized visually, no position information required
Object detection and social media commenting by mobile AR
Industrial applications
Collecting maintenance history and commentary
Tweets may be moderated, analyzed and further processed
Tacit knowledge, by maintenance people around the world
6. AR for City Planning
Stakeholder communication
Bringing mobile AR to city planning & decision making
Also, real estate, sales and marketing
7. AR for City Planning
Citizen Engagement
Commenting on plans and alternatives
E.g. each resident from individual viewpoint
8. Visualizing the Past
Augmenting historical photos
Pilot cases in Turku, Helsinki and Lahti
Showing how the city used to look like in gool old times
Pictures of history, memories
9. ALVAR Tracking SDK
”A Library for Virtual and Augmented Reality”
Computer vision based 3D tracking for AR
Leading performance, accuracy, robustness, speed
Functionality and Modules
ALVAR 2D: marker, multimarker and template based tracking
ALVAR 3D: point cloud based tracking, sensor fusion, SLAM
ALVAR for Unity: content authoring, point cloud optimization
Platforms
iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Windows, Linux, Mac, Flash