Augmented reality from 3d architectural models

Abstract

Usually in new places sign boards are used to provide directions or infrastructural information, this approach is quite rudimentary and limited. These boards can provide us with fixed and limited information and require physical space in the campus, further they cannot be updated frequently. In order to eliminate these limitation we proposed an idea and implemented a system that provides this meta information using augmented reality. In this project we present an android mobile phone application based on the concepts of augmented reality to retrieve meta information about real-life buildings (IIITD campus) via their architectural models. The aim of the application is to help users to readily get information about the buildings without any external help in real-time. In this project we started with model generation, followed by the transformation of the models from local coordinate system to UTM coordinate system. All the model data is stored in PostgreSQL database. We show that our application is able to retrieve meta information from the database via ray-intersection testing on the 3D architectural models. In this work we present a novel technique to automate identification of sub-building level spaces and navigation in 3D using digital replicas of real-life architectural buildings in an augmented reality environment. These digital replicas are created automatically using rule-based grammar from architectural blueprints. Our system is built on a geometric approach to creating the infrastructure, wherein we automatically extract topological information from 3D digital modelsand generate hierarchical tags for internal structures in a building. The geometric and topological information along with tags are stored in a spatial database. We address challenges in automating the entire process such that manual effort is reduced to minimal, and show scalability of our technique by creating such an infrastructure for a university campus which works for both indoor and outdoor spaces.