Augmented reality supporting user-centric building information management

The rapid development of geo-referenced information changed the way on how we access and interlink data. Smartphones as enabling devices for information access are main driving factor. Thus, the hash key to information is the actual position registered via camera and sensory of the mobile device. A rising technology in this context is Augmented Reality (AR) as its fuses the real world captured with the smartphone camera with geo-referenced data. The technological building blocks analyse the intrinsic sensor data (camera, GPS, inertial) to derive a detailed pose of the smartphone aiming to align geo-referenced information to our real environment. In particular, this is interesting to applications where 3D models are used in planning and organization processes as, e.g., facility management. Here, Building Information Models (BIM) were established in order to hold “as built” information, but also to manage the vast amount of additional information coming with the design, such as building components, properties, maintenance logs, documentation, etc. One challenge is to enable stakeholders involved in the overall building lifecycle to get mobile access to the management system within on-site inspections and to automatise feedback of newly generated information into the BIM. This paper describes a new AR framework that offers on-site access to BIM information and user centric annotation mechanism.