Industry Context for the Research
In showcases, Augmented Reality can be implemented to provide a highly sensitive, contextually-aware user interface to an enterprise’s facilities and assets. In such demonstrations, AR leverages prior investments to create and maintain “digital twins.” Having 3D models and maps of infrastructure and environments reduces the cost of AR experience development and discovery, and having AR-assisted devices continuously monitoring the real world permits updating the digital twins. Combining AR and 3D models and “spatially-anchored” or -aligned maps increases the ROI for several information technology stacks and reduces cost of operation and ownership.
Yet, in practice, enterprises seeking to expand their AR deployment in environments that can be captured in 3D are encountering significant obstacles. Even when available, AR experience authoring, publishing and delivery systems rarely connect to enterprise 3D environment maps, therefore, do not leverage existing investments. Developers must author or revise experiences every time there are changes in the environment. Users have to manually select AR experiences or AR-assisted procedures, instead of having a solution that automatically detects and associates procedures or other information with the user’s environment.
Practical knowledge about how to leverage existing spatial mapping for AR platforms and other tools/use cases is low. Knowledge of tools and techniques for creating and managing 3D environment maps (offline or in-situ) is also low. As a result, developers and engineers deploying enterprise AR miss valuable opportunities to:
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- Choose when/how/with which partners to add 3D mapping to their tool chains
- Integrate and leverage 3D mapping in their authoring platforms
- Integrate feature detection from 3D maps into AR experiences
- Quickly and accurately capture 3D environments
- Leverage existing standards for rapid/future-proof AR solutions based on 3D mapping
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Project Goal
The AREA seeks to provide its members knowledge and deep understanding of the current state of the art of continuous or periodic 3D mapping of enterprise and industrial environments for AR and the available tools to leverage this information for the development of spatially aware applications such as AR. The project will also provide actionable information which members can use to more effectively identify solution providers and partners, and to leverage prior investments made by their own organizations or by their customers and partners, in digital twins and 3D spatial maps.
Fixed Fee Project
The AREA Research Committee budget for this project is $15,000. Organizations interested in conducting this research for the fixed fee are invited to submit proposals.
More information
Full information on the project needs, desired outcomes and required components of a winning proposal, including a submission form, can be found here.
If you have any questions concerning this project and the AREA Research Committee, please send an email to the Research Committee.
