INSPIRER project

This combined research project aims to foster the user centered development of a demonstrator of a multi-user application with integrated mixed reality (MR) technology. This application shall encourage a wide range of population stratum to participate in democratic decision-making processes in urban planning using an immersive experience of virtual planning stages. Furthermore, through an intuitive and user-friendly user guidance and asynchronous interactions, inhibition thresholds to participate may be overcome.

The use of Augmented Reality (AR) in outside spaces and in the industry is becoming increasingly important. A precise positioning in urban environments is, however, hindered by high rise buildings causing a reduction in the precision of GPS. Indoors and at assembly lines, normally is void of any GPS signal. Using Point cloud matching algorithms, alternative positioning options (e.g. markers or image referencing) may be reduced and the precision of positioning can be improved.

At HFT Stuttgart, an architecture for an AR-client and a tracking System is conceptualized and implemented as a prototype under consideration of current soft- and hardware solutions. The focus is placed on an innovative tracking system that uses a point cloud matching method. An evaluation is done using concrete case-studies.

A new 6-DOF-tracking algorithm for mobile outdoor-AR applications shall be developed based on point clouds that complements existing methods, such as the line-of-sight-tracking. For this purpose, the project partners shall provide high-resolution point clouds as reference point clouds which were acquired e.g., from mobile mapping systems. Suitable sub-sections of these point clouds (i.e., based on the current region) shall be streamed to the user’s smart phone on demand in order to determine the exact field of view (position and heading) of the user.