INTEGRATED INFORMATION MODELING AND VISUAL SIMULATION OF ENGINEERING OPERATIONS USING DYNAMIC AUGMENTED REALITY SCENE GRAPHS

This paper describes research that investigated the applicability of 3D Augmented Reality (AR) in visualizing dynamic engineering operations. The research resulted in the design and development of ARVISCOPE, a general purpose high level AR animation scripting language, and ROVER, a mobile computing hardware framework. When used together, ARVISCOPE and ROVER can create 3D AR animations of arbitrary length and complexity at the operations level of detail. ARVISCOPE takes advantage of advanced Global Positioning System (GPS) and 3D orientation tracking technologies to accurately track a user's spatial context while georeferencing superimposed dynamic 3D graphics in an augmented environment. In achieving the research objectives, major technical challenges such as accurate registration, automated occlusion handling, and dynamic scene construction and manipulation were encountered and successfully addressed. This paper, describes the methodology and technical details of how scene graphs enable the process of constructing and updating an augmented scene representing a dynamic engineering operation.