Augmented and Virtual Reality for Underground Facilities Management

Abstract

Augmented reality (AR) has experienced a breakthrough in many areas of application thanks to cheaper hardware and a strong industry commitment. In the field of management of urban facilities, this technology allows virtual access and interaction with hidden underground elements. This paper presents a new approach to enable AR in mobile devices such as Google Tango, which has specific capabilities to be used outdoors. The first objective is to provide full functionality in the life-cycle management of subsoil infrastructures through this technology. This implies not only visualization, interaction, and free navigation, but also editing, deleting, and inserting elements ubiquitously. For this, a topological data model for three-dimensional (3D) data has been designed. Another important contribution of the paper is getting exact location and orientation performed in only a few minutes, using no additional markers or hardware. This accuracy in the initial positioning, together with the device sensing, avoids the usual errors during the navigation process in AR. Similar functionality has also been implemented in a nonubiquitous way to be supported by any other device through virtual reality (VR). The tests have been performed using real data of the city of Jaén (Spain).