UrbanPlanAR: BIM Mobile Visualisation in Urban Environments With Occlusion-Aware Augmented Reality

Effective visualisation is critical to a wide range of activities conducted in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry. This paper presents an occlusion-aware Augmented Reality (AR) solution that is geared towards the visualisation of new developments Ð in the form of 3D BIM models Ð in urban environments, to enhance communication around proposed developments. The solution automatically fetches BIM models from project repositories and enables a user to visualise them within their urban environment with a mobile tablet. The localisation of the tablet is achieved using a visual-inertial approach that uses only the sensors embedded in the tablet. Furthermore, the solution uniquely includes a process for handling occlusions from the real world on the augmented content. Results are presented that demonstrate the full pipeline, including some visualisation results obtained in real urban environments.