Hand-held Augmented Reality for Facility Maintenance

Abstract: Buildings and public infrastructures are crucial to our societies in that they provide habitations, workplaces, commodities and services indispensible to our daily life. As vital parts of facility management, operations and maintenance (O&M) ensure a facility to continuously function as intended, which take up the longest time in a facility’s life cycle and demand great expense. Therefore, computers and information technology have been actively adopted to automate traditional maintenance methods and processes, making O&M faster and more reliable.Augmented reality (AR) offers a new approach towards human-computer interaction through directly displaying information related to real objects that people are currently perceiving. People’s sensory perceptions are enhanced (augmented) with information of interest naturally without deliberately turning to computers. Hence, AR has been proved to be able to further improve O&M task performance.The research motif of this thesis is user evaluations of AR applications in the context of facility maintenance. The studies look into invisible target designation tasks assisted by developed AR tools in both indoor and outdoor scenarios. The focus is to examine user task performance, which is influenced by both AR system performance and human perceptive, cognitive and motoric factors.Target designation tasks for facility maintenance entail a visualization-interaction dilemma. Two AR systems built upon consumer-level hand-held devices using an off-the-shelf AR software development toolkit are evaluated indoors with two disparate solutions to the dilemma – remote laser pointing and the third person perspective (TPP). In the study with remote laser pointing, the parallax effect associated with AR “X-ray vision” visualization is also an emphasis.A third hand-held AR system developed in this thesis overlays infrared information on façade video, which is evaluated outdoors. Since in an outdoor environment marker-based tracking is less desirable, an infrared/visible image registration method is developed and adopted by the system to align infrared information correctly with the façade in the video. This system relies on the TPP to overcome the aforementioned dilemma.