https://placenote.com/ provides a software and service for registration of 3D scenes in AR: https://vertical.ai/.

To put it simply, Placenote lets you build AR apps that permanently place augmented reality content in precise locations, indoors and outdoors. Placenote does not need GPS, markers or beacons for geolocation. Instead, it uses an advanced computer vision system to provide an additional layer of mapping and persistent visual positioning to mobile AR apps built in Unity or Native Scenekit.

I have registered and built the example by using their kit.

https://placenote.com/documentation/

The sample allows you to position objects in a AR session and save the map to their service. Then in a consecutive AR session you can load the saved map again. The sample seems to work pretty well and successfully re-positions the objects. The accuracy is not very high, objects can be a bit off the intended position. If the starting position is very different (other side of a room) it doesn’t place the objects.

The source code of the sample is also available on github https://github.com/Placenote.

Kick off

We met in Zürich yesterday for the official kick off for the master thesis work.

We came up with the following goals for the next week:

• Work out a coarse plan for the master thesis work (until Februar 2019)
• In a first step implement a manual re-registration in the ARchi VR app:  https://itunes.apple.com/il/app/archi-vr/id1317896781?mt=8
• In a second step, investigate what can be automated in this process. E. g. edge detection, AR code, text recognition.

Discovery

Until now the time was spent with a discovery in the augmented reality (AR) environment. An investigation in the state of the art technologies have been conducted. From ARKit on iOS to ARCore on Android – a basic deep dive into the technology.

I have also got a access to the source code of ARchi VR which is located on a not public repository on the ZHAW github: https://github.engineering.zhaw.ch/acke/ARchiVR. I looked into the code and built and slightly adapted the sources to get a feeling for the ARKit technology in use and https://github.com/archilogic-com/3dio-js from https://3d.io/ by Archilogic, Zurich.

Also some basic business model considerations have been looked at, like usages in the maintenance environment (VR and AR, e. g. remote maintenance) or the area of the AR cloud, e. g. https://medium.com/super-ventures-blog/arkit-and-arcore-will-not-usher-massive-adoption-of-mobile-ar-da3d87f7e5ad.

This is a proposal draft of the master thesis topic. We decided to go with English for this project.

MasterThesis

Dies ist der Blog zu meiner Master Arbeit. Ich werde hier das Projekt dokumentieren und den Fortschritt und die gewonnenen Erkenntnisse festhalten.