Augmented reality interactive system to support space planning activities

Abstract

The Space Planning (SP) is a process that allows making an environment more ergonomic, functional and aesthetically pleasing. The introduction of Computer Aided tools for this kind of practice led to an increase of the quality of the final result thanks to some versatile support used for the generation of different options to consider for the evaluation. In particular, those based on Augmented Reality (AR) technologies allow evaluating several options directly in a real room. In this paper, an AR system, developed with the aim of supporting Space Planning activities, is proposed. The system has been developed in order to overcome some problems related to the tracking in wide environments and to be usable in different typologies of Space Planning environments. The paper also presents a qualitative evaluation of the AR system in three different scenarios. The positive results obtained through these evaluation tests show the effectiveness and the suitability of the system in different Space Planning contexts. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.