The presentation will be a range of wide area AR applications for different use cases, in cities (real estate, city planning, city info) as well as industries (construction, renovation, facility maintenance). As special topic, I’ll discuss how augmented Social Media can be taken further to industrial applications, for capturing tacit knowledge among maintenance workers. Technical topics include 3D tracking in wide area applications, enabling facility asset management and interaction with BIM and further links to enterprise systems.

2. Augmented Reality at VTT
Overview
 VTT is the 3rd largest research institute in Europe, over 2,400 employees
 AR / 3D Tracking team established in 2001, now 25 people in Espoo & Tampere
 Leading edge tracking technology: ALVAR SDK
 World first in various application fields
Application focus
 Industrial maintenance and training
 Wide area applications in buildings and cities
 Architecture, Engineering & Construction (AEC)

3. Markerless 3D Tracking
Point cloud based tracking
 Point clouds created from photos
 Enabling fast, accurate, robust tracking
 Automatic initialization without user interaction
 Sensor fusion, extended tracking
Tracking targets
 Unity based AR authoring: tracking targets and content
 Several optimizations, number of points, outliers, lighting etc.
 Updating of point clouds: based on user taken photos, or robots
 Wide areas: dynamic loading of point clouds, edge cloud servers

4. AR for Buildings
Facility management
 Building life cycle services: maintenance, operation & repair
 Mobile AR interaction with facility’s digital information systems
Example: Building maintenance
 Building Information Model (BIM) as framework to digital systems
 E.g. Facility Maintenance System, Building Automation, IoT
Example: Construction / renovation
 Mobile AR view and interaction with BIM based production plans
 Checking for daily work tasks, resources, schedules, etc.

5. AR Social Media
Linking real world objects to Social Media
 Attach hashtags and social media posts to real-world objects
 Create target objects by taking one or more reference image(s)
 Objects are recognized visually, no position information required
 Object detection and social media commenting by mobile AR
Industrial applications
 Collecting maintenance history and commentary
 Tweets may be moderated, analyzed and further processed
 Tacit knowledge, by maintenance people around the world

6. AR for City Planning
Stakeholder communication
 Bringing mobile AR to city planning & decision making
 Also, real estate, sales and marketing

7. AR for City Planning
Citizen Engagement
 Commenting on plans and alternatives
 E.g. each resident from individual viewpoint

8. Visualizing the Past
Augmenting historical photos
 Pilot cases in Turku, Helsinki and Lahti
 Showing how the city used to look like in gool old times
 Pictures of history, memories

9. ALVAR Tracking SDK
”A Library for Virtual and Augmented Reality”
 Computer vision based 3D tracking for AR
 Leading performance, accuracy, robustness, speed
Functionality and Modules
 ALVAR 2D: marker, multimarker and template based tracking
 ALVAR 3D: point cloud based tracking, sensor fusion, SLAM
 ALVAR for Unity: content authoring, point cloud optimization
Platforms
 iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Windows, Linux, Mac, Flash