Gerasimos-Dimitrios Danalis, "Mobile outdoors augmented reality for urban planning visualization", Diploma Work, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Technical University of Crete, Chania, Greece, 2024
https://doi.org/10.26233/heallink.tuc.101214
This thesis explores the process of designing, developing and implementinga fully functional, mobile, marker-less, augmented reality (AR) applicationfor the visualization of urban planning changes outdoors. This applicationfocuses on the urban reconstruction of three separate locations in the districtof Nea Chora, Chania. In each of these locations the user can place andinteract in unique ways with a set of different 3D virtual objects, such as abuilding, trees, benches, street lamps and a bicycle lane. Additionally, theapplication offers map navigation in order to assist the user in reaching thetarget locations and to ensure that the experience remains localized.Our application was developed using the Unity Game Engine in conjunctionwith the ARFoundation SDK, which enables the augmented realitycapabilities of the application, such as plane detection, environmental andobject tracking and virtual object anchoring. ARFoundation provided thenecessary framework for developing a marker-less, feature and sensor-basedAR application that runs on both Android and iOs devices, by utilizing theirrespective native AR SDKs. We have divided the AR functionality intothree distinct modes: 1) Placement mode, which is responsible for grounddetection, previewing the 3D models and placing them, 2) Edit Mode, whichimplements all the ways the user can interact with the virtual objects and 3)View Mode, in which the user can view the scene they created. In addition,we have also implemented a manager script that handles the transitions betweenmodes. Furthermore, we use the Haversine formula to calculate thedistance between the user and each target location based on latitude andlongitude received from the mobile device’s GPS sensor. The MapBox SDKwas used to implement a map screen capable of displaying a map of the localarea containing all the target locations, as well as providing navigationalinstructions to the user. For the creation of our 3D models we used Kritaand Unity’s ProBuilder. Lastly, we employed the ”think-out-loud” methodto evaluate our application and gather user feedback.