Google Tango Outdoors. Augmented Reality for Underground Infrastructures

Abstract

Underground infrastructures, which support much of the services provided to citizens, have the peculiarity of not being directly visible. This leads to problems when making incursions for maintenance or creating new installations. In this framework, new technologies related to augmented reality are of special interest. This work presents a virtual reality application using Google Tango in order to visualize underground infrastructures in situ, allowing also free navigation. The system works on a clientserver architecture. The client obtains the location point as well as the orientation of the device. The server returns the virtual visualization of infrastructure elements and buildings from this viewpoint, which will be superimposed over the actual view. The server maintains a spatial database with topological characteristics that allow this and other modes of interaction, as well as some analytical capacity. This article focuses on aspects such as the transformation of input data, the data model, the different methodologies for rapid and effective positioning, as well as the usability of the application.