On LinkedIn this week, Trimble’s Mixed Reality Program head Aviad Almagor published news about a prototype that could help solve the problem of outdoor positioning for augmented reality.
The solution is brilliantly simple. SiteVision is designed to be used outdoors—presumably for certain construction design and mining applications—so it doesn’t require the complex locating technologies we use when we’re denied access to positioning satellites. Instead, it implements Trimble’s Catalyst GNSS solution, which uses software and a powerful antenna to locate a mobile device to within a few centimeters.
SiteVision combines Catalyst with a Lenovo Phab2 Pro. You may know this phone as one of the first Google Tango-enabled mobile devices. It uses the 3D capture technology to track the viewpoint and orientation of the AR device–information that is necessary for ensuring that digital holograms appear rooted in space, rather than jumping around as you move.
Together, Almagor notes, this makes “an efficient solution to accurately align the design models to the real world.”
Let’s hope this prototype is a sign of things to come.
