GEUINF: Real-Time Visualization of Indoor Facilities Using Mixed Reality

Abstract

Mixed reality (MR) enables a novel way to visualize virtual objects on real scenarios considering physical constraints. This technology arises with other significant advances in the field of sensors fusion for human-centric 3D capturing. Recent advances for scanning the user environment, real-time visualization and 3D vision using ubiquitous systems like smartphones allow us to capture 3D data from the real world. In this paper, a disruptive application for assessing the status of indoor infrastructures is proposed. The installation and maintenance of hidden facilities such as water pipes, electrical lines and air conditioning tubes, which are usually occluded behind the wall, supposes tedious and inefficient tasks. Most of these infrastructures are digitized but they cannot be visualized onsite. In this research, we focused on the development of a new application (GEUINF) to be launched on smartphones that are capable of capturing 3D data of the real world by depth sensing. This information is relevant to determine the user position and orientation. Although previous approaches used fixed markers for this purpose, our application enables the estimation of both parameters with a centimeter accuracy without them. This novelty is possible since our method is based on a matching process between reconstructed walls of the real world and 3D planes of the replicated world in a virtual environment. Our markerless approach is based on scanning planar surfaces of the user environment and then, these are geometrically aligned with their corresponding virtual 3D entities. In a preprocessing phase, the 2D CAD geometry available from an architectural project is used to generate 3D models of an indoor building structure. In real time, these virtual elements are tracked with the real ones modeled by using ARCore library. Once the alignment between virtual and real worlds is done, the application enables the visualization, navigation and interaction with the virtual facility networks in real-time. Thus, our method may be used by private companies and public institutions responsible of the indoor facilities management and also may be integrated with other applications focused on indoor navigation.

Manufacturing domain instruction comprehension using synthetic data

“…For instance, when the objects need to be gathered from different locations, the AR glasses are more suitable than a static robotic arm due to the ability to incorporate supplementary information, such as indoor navigation [43]. It also facilitates the overlay of information onto the screen [44], enhancing usability [45], [46]. The headset's lightweight nature eliminated the need to carry bulky manuals, especially valuable in sectors like industrial repair, maintenance, and heavy-duty industries such as automotive and aerospace engineering.…”

Application of 3D Software Virtual Reality in Interior Designing

“…where i = 1, 2, ⋯, n represents image feature points, j = 1, 2, ⋯, m represents the number of images, λ represents the scaling parameters corresponding to the feature points, R and T represent the rotation matrix and translation vector, respectively, and R j and T j represent the changes caused by the comparison between the j indoor scene image and the first frame image [12,13]. Multiply both sides of the above formula (6) by x i j ∧ to obtain…”

“…The a of the two indoor scene diagrams is not the global solution due to the interference caused by some factors such as noise. Bring the obtained R j and T j into formula (12) to obtain the global solution of a i :…”

Enhancing BIM through Mixed Reality for Facility Management

“…From an ICT perspective, the use of a BIM-based operational framework in a cloud platform has the potential to integrate and make enriched data (e.g., from energy simulations or predictive maintenance assessments) accessible to all stakeholders [5]. Finally, from the pure operational standpoint, the virtualization of the facility model allows the evolution of the operational workflow through the use of new mixed reality techniques [6].…”